Shutting down a Gilford lake house for winter, or opening it up in May — on Governors Island, along the Glendale shore, or anywhere off Route 11. Air through every line, antifreeze in every trap, the boathouse and the dock handled, and a sheet left behind that says exactly what we did.
Governors Island is about 504 acres of mostly wooded, mostly residential ground off the Gilford shore, and it’s connected to the mainland by the Summit Avenue bridge. There’s been a bridge there since 1820; the present one went up in 1981 and got repairs in 2020. A lot of the island’s houses are big, a lot of them are second homes, and a lot of them have more water fixtures than the owners could list from memory. Outdoor showers. Wet bars. Two kitchens.
Down at Glendale the picture changes. The docks there serve island residents — people whose camp is only reachable by boat once the lake has them. A closing on one of those isn’t a drive. It’s a trip planned around weather and the water, and anything forgotten stays forgotten until spring.
Gilford also has the opposite problem: houses up the hill in the Acres and toward Belknap Mountain that close for the summer half and get used for skiing. Same job, flipped calendar. We keep track of which is which.
Ask us for a copy of the shutdown sheet by text or email too. The paper one in the cellar door doesn’t help when you’re in Florida wondering whether the softener got drained.
The walk-through is where a good closing starts. We go fixture by fixture and write it down: every sink and toilet, every shower, the tub nobody uses, the dishwasher, the ice maker, the washer, the softener or filter housing, the outdoor shower, the hose bibs on the dock and the boathouse. On a well, the pump and pressure tank. On a camp still drawing from the lake for wash water, the foot valve and the line, which come out before ice-in.
Then air. Low pressure, controlled, every run until it spits dry — because the long horizontal line out to a boathouse is exactly where a cup of water sits and waits for January. Heater drained. Antifreeze into every trap and toilet. Appliances handled one at a time, not assumed.
And the sheet. It goes inside the panel door or the cellar door, wherever the next person will actually look. If you sell the place, rent it, or hand it to a son-in-law who’s never opened it before, he’ll know what’s drained and what isn’t.
A one-bathroom Gilford camp is $400 to close. Two or more bathrooms starts at $1,000, and a big island or shorefront house with the full list — boathouse, filters, softener, outdoor shower, irrigation — gets quoted once we’ve walked it. Spring opening costs less than the closing. Most owners book both at once.
Try to be done by the end of October. Hard freezes come early in November more years than not, and waterfront work — boathouses, dock bibs, lake-draw lines — is miserable once it’s cold and wet. If you use the place through foliage, book the date in September so you aren’t at the back of the line.
Mostly scale. Island houses tend to carry more fixtures than a typical camp — second kitchens, outdoor showers, irrigation, a boathouse — and every one of them holds water. The bridge means we drive right to you, which makes it simpler than a boat-access camp. It just takes longer.
Yes, with planning. We need to know what’s there before we go: pump type, heater, number of fixtures, whether you draw from the lake. Then one trip does the whole job. Forgetting a part on an island means waiting for another day with decent weather on the water.
For a Gilford house you ski out of on weekends, often yes — with a low-temperature alarm and a backup plan for power outages. Most homeowner policies expect 55°F or a shut-off supply in a vacant house. For a place nobody sees from Columbus Day to May, draining down is the safer call.
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Describe what’s happening and where the property is. We’ll come back with a straight answer on what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there. If it’s an emergency, say so in the first line.
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