We close seasonal houses in Tamworth the slow way — pump down, tank drained, every line blown out with air, every trap treated, and a written list of what we did. Chocorua Lake cottages, White Lake camps, the place off 113A you use for ski season. Spring openings booked at the same time.
Chocorua Lake has been a summer place since the 1880s, and it’s stayed one on purpose. Motorboats have been banned there by state law since the early 1970s, the covenants around the basin call for eight-acre lots and a 150-foot no-cut buffer, and something like 95 percent of the watershed is under some kind of protection. What that means for us is a ring of older cottages — some well over a century old — on long wooded driveways, with plumbing that was added in stages by people who came up in June and left after Labor Day.
That’s the Tamworth closing season, more or less. The Barnstormers runs late June into the last week of August, the White Lake campground empties out, and by Columbus Day most of the lake houses are shut. The ones that get closed properly are fine in April. The ones where somebody opened the faucets and hoped — those are the ones we meet in the spring with a split line behind a bathroom wall.
A lot of these places have exactly the kind of plumbing that punishes a quick shutdown: a pump and pressure tank in a crawlspace, a water heater in a closet, an outdoor shower, a hose bib on the lake side, and a lake-draw line somebody put in for the garden. Every one of those holds water. Every one has to be dealt with on its own.
The Barnstormers’ last show is the end of August. If you’re leaving Tamworth for the season right after, that’s the week to book the closing — not the week you get home and remember.
The first hour on an old Chocorua place is spent finding things. These cottages were plumbed in stages — galvanized in the twenties, copper when the kids inherited it, PEX when the last bathroom went in — and there’s nearly always a fixture nobody mentioned: a lav in the old maid’s room, a sink in the boathouse, a spigot behind the woodshed for washing fish. We walk the whole building before a single valve gets turned, because the fixture you don’t find is the one that splits.
Then the water comes out. Pump breaker off, pressure tank drained, water heater drained, and compressed air pushed through from the farthest fixture back toward the source. Old copper runs under a cottage floor almost always have a belly somewhere — a low spot gravity will never empty — and air is the only thing that clears it. Every trap and toilet gets non-toxic antifreeze. Filter housing opened. Ice maker line cleared. Anything that draws from the lake comes out of the lake.
Last: photographs of every valve in the position we left it, and a sheet on the kitchen counter listing what was drained, what was treated, and what was deliberately left charged. Caretakers change. Owners hand cottages down. The sheet is how the next person opens the place without guessing.
Closing a Tamworth camp generally runs $175–$450; the spread is fixtures, well versus village water, and how many extras — filter, softener, outdoor shower, lake line — the house has collected over the years. Spring opening is priced about the same, and most Chocorua owners book the pair.
Most owners close between Columbus Day and the first week of November. Hard freezes on the lake side of town come early — Tamworth’s January average low is around 10°F, and the shoulder nights in late October can already dip into the teens. If you’re unsure, book for mid-October and we’ll move it if the weather holds.
You can, and every spring we meet people who did. Opening faucets drains what gravity can reach. It leaves water in low horizontal runs, in the pressure tank, in the water heater, in the filter housing, and in every trap. Any one of those can split. Blowing the lines out with air is the step that actually matters.
Some. There’s no well pump to shut down, so we isolate at the meter or curb stop instead. Everything downstream is the same job: blow out the lines, drain the heater, treat the traps. The one thing to check is whether the community system wants to know you’ve shut off — a few do.
Yes, and we’d rather do both, because then we know exactly how the house was closed. Opening means pump on, system filled slowly, every fixture checked while it’s under pressure, heater refilled before power goes to it, and a walk-through for any leaks that showed up over the winter.
It comes out of the water. Foot valve, line, and the pump if there is one — before ice. Chocorua is shallow at the edges and freezes earlier than the big lakes. A draw line left in gets crushed or split by the ice, and it’s the item most often forgotten on a do-it-yourself closing.
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