If the cabin was our foothold, the lodge was the mountain.
Five bedrooms, one story, and a whole lot of cat urine. The place had been previously inhabited by a beer-drinking hoarder with more cats than we could count. Every surface needed help, but the bathrooms — they had to be completely gutted. The smell was its own character in the early days. We scrubbed, ripped, and sprayed everything we could. I used a paint sprayer for the first time, which was an experience unto itself.
Brian and our good friend Jimmy spent days leveling the building itself. This was mid-COVID, and we had no real margin for delay or error. We listed it as a rental for June 1st — without a single photo.
We were grouting the bathroom floor the night before our first guest checked in. At the last second, we had to install a washer and dryer — they’d booked over a month, and we hadn’t planned for laundry. Ceiling fans got installed. A countertop got DIYed — and then done again after the first one buckled. Most of the furniture came from antique stores nearby or secondhand surprises we found in town. We replaced the water heater, added gutters, and somehow pulled it together.
Our one big splurge? A flagstone firepit. It felt like a promise: that something permanent and beautiful was taking root here.
We spent that first week fixing everything we missed. The water had a sulfur smell, so we brought in a filtration system. We realized the bedrooms had no desks or clothing storage, so we scrambled to buy them on the fly. And yet, through all of it, our first guests were warm, patient, and gracious — the kind of people who reminded us that this wasn’t just about survival anymore. We were building something people might actually care about.
