Sitting in a plane waiting for takeoff. It’s a Spirit redeye - always miserable but absurdly cheap. We paid extra for an exit row and I can tell it’s gonna be worth every penny.

Kim was due to deliver today but our second grandson is a bit late. If she doesn’t deliver by Friday they’re going to induce. We’ll be there for support.

While we’re in Ohio we’ll be looking a retirement property. We really want something on the lake.

I’ll post pics when I get home. I have no way to resize them on this phone.

Exciting!

Nice, Steve! Congratulations in advance!

You want to enjoy a real "lake effect" I see ...

Exciting days ahead. Congrats.

We've flown Spirit and bought the "1st class" upgrade - couple of rows in the front with 2+2 seats instead of 3+3 and more legroom. It was actually a nice experience!

Safe travels and enjoy!

That's a very exciting reason for a trip. Hope everything goes well.

Big Al

Safe travels.

Too bad you can't hit Cincy this trip - Blink 2019 is going on.

https://www.cincinnati.com/sto...xz5IwrGR0dMCmsG5uTeQ

Congrats!

All the best with the new grandchild, Steve.

We paid for an upgrade to an exit row and it made a world of difference!

Cleveland rocks, ya know.

Here is the house we saw yesterday.

3722 Edgewater Vermilion

There is a lot to like here. The garage is enormous and has some 12 ft of clearance under the rafters. The front yard is on the small side and the driveway is short so there is not much to maintain and not much to shovel in winter. The view across the lake is all the way to Canada - fantastic! Newish roof, $70K in recent sea wall upgrades ( ) newer vinyl siding and windows. Two doors down from where Kim and Jeff got married.

OTOH, the house was built in 1950, remodeled many times since then, and it shows. Nothing is quite straight, nothing is quite plumb. Things don’t always line up and floor levels change room to room. The second floor is a tight maze of little rooms tucked under the roofline, and random orphan spaces that serve no particular purpose. The swim spa is a beast and would have to go. That room smells like the gym at the YMCA.

I could fix all of that, but the deal killer has to do with the basement. I can see now that I need to learn a whole lot more about them or hire someone who already knows. The floors on the ground floor are all out of level and the reason appears to be a basement that was very damp for a very long time. The current owner spent $15K waterproofing it last year and there is some new shoring installed, but the damage has been done. The floor joists are all soft and sagging even with a dehumidifier running what appears to be 24/7. I don’t want to deal with any of this and have taken the house off the list.

Tomorrow we may see the this house on the same street: 30 years newer and looks to be mostly original. No A/C but I can fix that. Nice deck; same small yard as the other house.

OTOH, if the baby comes I doubt we’ll be looking at any more houses.

Shorefront homes in Door County all tend to be damp; not sure if it's the lake, the abundance of trees, or the geology below.

We have a cement floor crawl and the dehumidifier runs all spring/summer/fall. In the spring when the snow melts the floor is covered in water that runs across the floor over to sump pump. The seepage is a problem for a couple of weeks in spring in some years, but otherwise the crawl is dry and doesn't smell musty. Even houses on slabs in our neighborhood have that Wisconsin smell.

I wonder what those houses look like on the lake side exposure during the winter. That first one is really close to the lake. Rough water plus wind gives a nice spray and ice coating if the exposure is just right...

We have a 75 foot setback from the high water mark and quite a few trees between the house and lake to break the wind, so no ice for us. About twenty miles south of us, there's this....

That's a really pretty location, and the house looks very nice!

A house doesn't have to be built in the 50's for nothing to be plumb. There were issues like that with my Massachusetts house.

But yeah, the swim spa, no kidding. I wanted to build a room for my hot tub in Massachusetts, and my contractor talked me out of it ... he said everything would decay. That treadmill will rot pretty fast (along with everything else!).

That photo is why I want to live here on the lake!

The first house had a sump pump but I was surprised it was required because the house was some 30 ft. higer than the lake. The second house is equally high but built on a slab. I haven’t decided if the house xtra space afforded by a basement offsets all of the various problems they can have.

Houses here that are 10 to 20 feet above the lake and built on a slab are still damp. But we are in the middle of a dense cedar forest and not as "neighborhoody" as the couple of homes you've posted.

You're right: The scenery is gorgeous, especially in winter. Mother Nature in her rawest beauty.

Some of the other interesting things about Door County, especially waterfront, that I never considered before building there....not sure if they would apply to what you're looking at...

Mayflies in the late spring are an awful nuisance even though they don't bite. Some awful biting flies in the summer. And ticks if you have deer. I had a close encounter earlier this summer and was infected with Borrelia bacteria, aka Lyme disease. If you're in wetlands, abundance of mosquitoes.

eta: Mayflies around Lake Erie. U haz them.

http://www.mayflynews.net/