Welcome to Pretty Lake Things
When I started looking to refit my lake house after a good number of neglectful years, I expected to find something like LAKE MAGAZINE or something to help me fill the knowledge gap with pictures of small homes full of hygge. Lake Magazine does exist, but its audience is very targeted to a small lake in Alabama. There are plenty of niche periodicals and websites but few that provide the type of information I want to see: people with realistic homes with solutions for problems that we all have at the lake like corrosion, rodents, mold, mildew, expansion and contraction with heat and humidity, and all of the little things that make the lake a harder place to plan for.
And the hardest of all has been finding sources for reliable recommendations for seasonal residences. There are so many extra considerations that need to be made when accounting for houses that may not be heated all year round or have varying levels of humidity.
And so I’ve created this site to accomplish a number of things.
One is to provide a catalog of all the products and ideas I’ve had so that you (and I) don’t repeat the same mistakes.
A second is to provide recommendations for things which are both functional and aesthetically pleasing and will survive the harsher lake environment.
The third is to showcase the products which have worked the best for and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone’s situation is different, so maybe I needed something you don’t or you need to consider something I don’t.
This isn’t my lake house. I’m not convinced anyone’s seasonal place is that clean.
This isn’t the place to figure out which Wolf stove top is best for your 4000 sq ft estate. The lake house I know is 600 sq ft, no insulation under the floor and had a finicky jet pump for the better part of 5 years. We only just managed to get some decent insulation in the walls upstairs a few years ago.
Why should you listen to some person on the internet? Because I have 20 years of experience on the lake. I’ve broken many things. Just like a lot of intergenerational homes, I also inherited a number of things. Some worked well. Some were junk. Some were just plain dangerous.
Please bear with me as I explore the functional and aesthetic choices that I have made through the years and continue to make. Over the next year or two I’ll be reorganizing and replacing the housewares as well as removing many of the things that haven’t been used in a decade; like the entire drawer of purple handled silverware.
Yes, most of the links are affiliate links to help defray the cost of hosting the website. When I get my Dell R630 back in order, that’ll be much less that the billion dollars Squarespace is currently charging me.