Our new lake house

Congratulations to my cousin Rachel and her husband Justin on the birth of their son, Sam!



I hadn't wanted to mention anything in the blog about this until things were final, but recently we purchased a vacation home on a lake in Michigan! We've officially owned it for a little over a week now, and Andy and I spent last weekend up there doing a bunch of work while Grandma and Grandpa Nold watched Jack. Our friends Don, Emma, Dave, Megan, and baby Leah also spent a night there and helped christen the house.

The house is on Fisher Lake in Three Rivers, Michigan, which is about a 2 1/2 hour drive from Chicago. The house was built, and largely decorated, in the 1970's. So there's a ton of fabulous wood paneling and some awesome shag carpet. But decoration aside, it's a great space, and just what we were looking for in a lake house. It's also a very unique space and has a lot of interesting and quirky features.

The picture up top is the view from our back porch, and at the end of the dock is our boat! We don't have any waterskis or wakeboards yet, but we look forward to spending time just being out on the water and enjoying our weekends. All of us (Jack and Louie included) will be leaving tomorrow afternoon to go up there for a nice long holiday weekend.

Okay, now for a brief tour of the house. Here's the view when you walk in the front door. As you can see, the house is very long and narrow.


After going down the stairs at the end of the hallway, you enter the kitchen and living room area. Here's the living room (and Dave & Don).


Here's Emma, Megan, and the kitchen.


Another view of the kitchen.


The upstairs hallway.


One of the upstairs bedrooms.


The back porch, which is screened in.


I also wanted to include some pictures of the unique components and fixtures in the house. Here's what the sinks in the bathrooms look like. The sinks also have a hidden shelf for soap along the back of the basins, which you can't see unless you look in the mirror at the reflection.


The humongous fireplace. You can actually bake bread in the little cubby on the left. When the chimney sweep came, he told Andy an interesting story about the fireplace. The orginal owner, who had the house built, had seen a fireplace like this somewhere and liked it so much he decided he had to have it in his house. So he found the architect and flew him out from the East Coast just so he could make the fireplace.


You may have caught a glimpse in the hallway pictures of all the wall fixtures. None are exactly the same. Here's a close up of one of them.


The interesting chandelier in the dining room.


And finally, the lovely orangey shag carpet in one of the bedrooms.


I realized after we got home that I never took a picture of the outside of the house, so I'll try to do that this weekend. It's also very interesting-looking. All you can see from the road is the garage, which looks like a huge barn.

I probably won't be posting any more entries until we get back from Michigan, so happy early 4th of July to everyone!