We close seasonal houses in Sandwich the slow way — pump down, pressure tank and heater drained, every line blown out with air, every trap treated, and a written sheet left on the counter. Squam shore places, camps off 113, the island camp you have to run a boat to. Spring openings booked at the same time.
Squam Lake takes up the southwestern corner of Sandwich, and Squam is the lake that stayed quiet on purpose. Just under sixty-eight hundred acres, ninety-nine feet at the deepest, the second-largest lake lying entirely in New Hampshire — and almost no commercial shoreline. The Squam Lakes Association keeps four public launches on it. There are around thirty named islands out there, and a fair number of them have camps.
The rest of Sandwich is seasonal in a quieter way. The last full housing count had 1,057 dwellings in town, 440 of them vacant, and 373 of those listed as seasonal or recreational. That’s not a rental economy. That’s a town where a lot of houses belong to families who use them for part of the year and then lock the door.
Which makes closing season the busiest three weeks of our fall. The Sandwich Fair runs Columbus Day weekend, and the week after the Fair is when half the town shuts down. Everybody calls at once. The camps that get closed properly are fine in April. The ones where somebody opened the taps and hoped — those are the April calls with a split line behind a wall.
If your Sandwich camp is on Squam, book the closing before the Fair rather than after. The week after Columbus Day is when the whole town calls, and the good weather windows on the lake are gone by early November.
An island camp on Squam is the same job with one difference: there’s no coming back for the thing you forgot. Tools go in the boat, the work gets done in one trip, and the sheet we leave has to be right, because nobody is running back out there in December to check a valve. We plan those around the weather window rather than the calendar, and we’d sooner go a week early than get caught by a rough day.
On the mainland the order is the same every time. Find every fixture in the building first — and on an old Sandwich camp that is genuinely the longest part of the visit, because these places got plumbed in pieces. A sink in the boathouse. A lav somebody framed into a closet in 1978. A hose bib on the lake side for rinsing off. Every one of them holds water.
Then the water comes out. Pump breaker off, pressure tank drained, water heater drained and shut down, and compressed air pushed from the farthest fixture back toward the source. Gravity will not clear a horizontal run with a belly in it, and most old camp piping has at least one. Traps and toilets get non-toxic antifreeze. Filter housings opened. Anything drawing out of the lake — foot valve, line, pump — comes out of the lake before ice.
Last thing: photographs of every valve the way we left it, and a written list on the kitchen counter of what got drained, what got treated, and what was deliberately left charged. Camps change hands. Caretakers change. The sheet is how the next person opens the place without guessing.
Closing a Sandwich camp generally runs $175–$450, driven by fixture count and how many extras the place has collected over the years — filter, softener, outdoor shower, lake-draw line. Island camps are quoted per trip, because the boat is part of the job. Spring opening prices about the same, and most owners book the pair.
Most Sandwich owners close between Columbus Day and the first week of November. The Fair weekend is the unofficial signal, and it’s also when every plumber in the region gets called at once. Book in September and we’ll set a date. If October stays warm, we can move it.
You can. Every spring we meet people who did. Open faucets drain what gravity can reach and nothing else — water stays in the low horizontal runs, in the pressure tank, in the water heater, in the filter housing, and in every trap in the house. Any one of those can split. The air is the step that matters.
Yes, and we schedule those first. There’s no second trip to an island in November, so the whole job gets done in one visit and the written record has to be complete. We watch the weather window rather than the calendar, and we’d rather go early than get weathered off the lake.
No. A full tank in an unheated camp is a burst tank, and it usually takes the fittings and sometimes the floor with it. It gets drained and shut down — electric, propane, or oil-fired. On the spring opening it gets refilled before power or fuel goes anywhere near it, in that order, every time.
They do. Housings opened, cartridges out, bypass set where there is one, units drained. They’re on the list because they’re the thing most often missed on a do-it-yourself closing, and a cracked filter housing in a crawlspace floods a camp just as thoroughly as a split copper line does.
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