4 min read
What goes wrong in a lake house nobody is watching
The most common problems in an empty Northwest Indiana lake house over winter are dry drain traps letting sewer gas into the house, a sump pump that has failed without anyone noticing, damp and musty air from a house shut up for months, and ice dams. Most are cheap to prevent and expensive to discover in April. Running every faucet and flushing every toilet on each visit takes ninety seconds and prevents the most common one entirely.
Long Beach, Beverly Shores, Ogden Dunes and Dune Acres are full of houses that are properly lived in for four months and shut for the other eight. The problems those houses get are not the problems a lived-in house gets.
Dry traps, which is the common one
Every drain in the house has a bend holding a little water, and that water is the only thing between you and the sewer line. In an empty house it evaporates, usually in six to eight weeks. Then the house smells, and everybody assumes something has died in a wall.
The fix is running every faucet and flushing every toilet for about ninety seconds on any visit. It is the single most skipped step and the single cheapest one.
The sump pump
A sump pump that has failed looks identical to one that is fine. The only way to know is to pour a bucket of water into the pit and watch it cycle. Looking at it tells you nothing, and a failed pump plus a February thaw is a finished basement.
Damp and the air itself
A house shut up for months with the heat at 55 gets musty in a way that is genuinely hard to reverse once soft furnishings have taken it on. Condensation on the inside of windows is the early sign, and Duneland houses get more of it than places a few miles inland.
Ice dams
Visible from the ground, cheap to deal with early, and a ceiling if left. Worth a look at the roofline on any winter visit.
The photographs matter more than the cleaning
If somebody is checking your place while you are in Chicago, what you actually want is not a tidy house. It is a set of photographs, the same shots in the same order every time, so you can see the furnace, the water heater, under the sinks, the sump pit and the thermostat reading, and stop wondering.