I loved my lake house the minute I laid eyes on it! After viewing the little mobile home I looked at for $80,000.00, this was a dream house. The price was a hefty $225,000.00 and it was worth it. 3 bedrooms, a large kitchen, an open dining room, cozy living room, even a little cove for the woodstove and a good size foyer. 1250 square feet in all, 2 outdoor sheds, crawl space under the house, new septic, new well and 110 feet of lake front.
As I stood on the long dock looking up at the impressive ledge bank that climbed straight up 20 feet from the water to the house I said to my realtor, “I want to buythis house, how much do you think I should offer?” We both thought that $200 K would be a good start. I was so excited that after hearing even more good things about the house (the furniture and house wares come with the house, and there’s outdoor lighting on the stairs, etc), I made the mistake (?) of saying that I was very interested in buying the house. About then my agent lead me swiftly by the arm out of the house, “Uh, we’ll talk about that later,” he said.”
I was a bit perturbed to find out that the realtor had not brought the paper work with him and while I waited about an hour for him to return my friend Pete took me for a spin in his boat out to see the house from the water. Well, just then I saw a woman standing on the dock looking up at the house and I gulped, “Pete,” I said, “That woman is going to buy my house.” It was then that I decided to make the owners a full offer! Sure enough, she put a bid of $220,000.00. I guess it was lucky for me that the realtor didn’t come with the paper work on this particular day, onlyhat was about where my luck ended for a while!
It seemed I waited an eternity to hear from the realtor. That’s because he was waiting on the primary realtor, Wenda Byrd of Century 21, to get back to him as to whether the owners had accepted my offer. Come to find out, Wenda had never given the owners the benefit of knowing that I was interested in their house because she had other notions as to just who would buy that house, especially since she stood to receive full commission for the sale by getting her client in that house. Finally, my realtor timidly asked my friend Peter to drop by the house to see what the owners knew, that’s when we discovered that the owner’s didn’t even know that there was another offer, although they do remember inquiring about “the lady from New York” who seemed so interested. Apparently, Wenda Byrd decided to keep that information to herself and I was lucky again when my friend Pete informed the owners of the truth, and since my offer was $5,000 more than Wenda’s client the owners accepted my offer, naturally.
The next issue was with the mortgage company (Magnum from LendingTree.com) after 4 weeks of grueling back and forth work, they dropped me 4 days before the scheduled closing. They simple stated, “We’re not doing this.” Apparently, they had never sold a 3 season, lake front property and were pressuring me to have a furnace installed (at my expense) to make the house into a cheap, makeshift 4-season home; Magnum Mortgage also wanted me to go with one of those prime rate mortgages but I was insisting on a traditional fixed rate loan. What made me mad was that I had asked them right up front if they had had experience selling 3 season, lake front property, to which they replied, “Sure we do,” NOT!
Well, I finally got a local mortgage company when my realator (Gilbert of Poultney) exclaimed “We get mortages on houses that are falling into the lake; I’ll bet they’ve already sold your mortgage.” So, I prayed that the owners agreed to wait another month for a new mortgage, this company (National City Mortgage) was superb and very creative.
It is 2009 as I sit down with my granddaughter to write what our Lake Front cabin means to our family. Sixty-five years ago my experiences on the lake first began when my parents rented a cottage several weeks each summer for our vacation. My dad fished, I went horseback riding with friends, swan, hiked, kept busy all day. Both my mother and father and I had the same friends that kept drawing us back each year, too. My family loved it so much that in 1956 they bought property on the lake and built our cottage that still draws my whole family even today. My two daughters and son have come here since they were babies and have grown to love it from those childhood days. Now my married daughters and son are coming here with my ten grandchildren. (My son bought his own place.) The children begin their days fishing off the dock, swinging in the hammock, riding on the zip line... Next there is horseback riding, boating, waterskiing, tubing and hours of swimming... They are happy here and the ten cousins "love" it when they can be together at "camp". (They spend hours scheming of ways to get back here together.) Very few places afford this simplistic life style where the quality of shared time, so valuable to relationships, can be experienced differently than almost any place else. How blessed we are to have a Lake front cabin where there is always refuge and a place to find release from cares and responsibilities when they pile up. When this place gets in your blood, it becomes a second home! Carole S.