My mom said I wasn’t welcome at my own lake house—after I spent $67K fixing it up. So I sold it while they were still inside. True story. You won’t believe what they found when they got home.
My mom said I wasn’t welcome at my own lake house—after I spent $67,000 fixing it up. So I sold it while they were still inside.
My name is Claire Bennett, and the lake house sits outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. My grandfather left it to me when he died, along with a handwritten note that said, “Make this place yours before someone else decides what it should be.”
For six years, I did exactly that.
The roof leaked. The deck had rotted through. The kitchen still had avocado-green cabinets from 1978. I refinanced my condo, picked up weekend consulting work, and poured $67,000 into making the place livable again. New plumbing. New windows. A rebuilt dock. I even restored the stone fireplace my grandfather had built himself.
Then my mother, Diane, started calling it “the family lake house.”
