First of all, Karen - welcome aboard to the SmartThings community. There is a wealth of help here so hopefully you will have a good experience. There are many folks here who are not technical, but in my experience as I have watched and participated in this new world of smart things, those folks really struggle unless they embrace the do-it-yourself nature of SmartThings. In other words, my advice is to make a decision right up front about whether you want to become more technical or not. If you do, then dive in and start learning how to tinker with the SmartApps framework, learn about tweaking existing SmartApps, and learn how to tweak device controllers to suit your needs. If you do not, then you will likely become frustrated trying to get SmartThings to do what you really want it to do unless your needs are very simple without any custom requirements.
If you find yourself in this state, my advice would be to hire someone to help you with the technical aspects of configuring your vacation home to manage remotely. Okay, with all that said, so far what you are asking to do with the lock is fairly straightforward. Whether you can figure out the examples noted will be a good test to honestly assess whether you can take the do-it-yourself route - of course with lots of help here. Provide as much detail about what stumped you and why you think it might not be working and we’ll try to help.
The AC remote may be more tricky since this is a plug in AC with a thermostat that was not built to communicate with the Z-wave network. To get this to work remotely you will have to hack into your remote to get it to talk to Z-wave. I think I have seen some custom devices that control generic IR remotes over the Zwave network. I did a quick scan for IR control and found this:
I have no idea how well it works, and adopting this and trying to apply it to your situation will involve some technical know-how - nothing too complex but more complex than installing a smartapp to control your door lock. You could plug it into a Z-wave power switch and turn that on and off remotely, but I think an AC wall unit won’t automatically come on when it is first powered up, and even if it did, you would not be able to control the temperature set point that way. You’ll definitely want to connect a ST sensor to your remote somehow.
I started playing with ST about 6 months ago and in that short period of time I have learned enough to do just about anything I need with a little patience and trial and error. I hope your ST journey is just as fun and productive.