How We Found Our Lake Home

We just passed our five-year anniversary of living on the lake.

Five years. I honestly don’t know how that happened.

We’ve had some real adventures since moving here—some good, some not so good—and I thought it would be fun to go back to the beginning and share how we ended up here.

In 1999, we moved to the area where we still live today, just north of Atlanta and a few miles from Lake Lanier. For more than twenty years, we lived close to the lake. We drove past it every day.

And for twenty years, we dreamed about living on it.

So when I say making that dream happen was an adventure, I’m not exaggerating.

There were a lot of dreams.

A lot of hard work.

And a lot of ugly houses.

If you’ve ever dreamed about lake life yourself, I thought it would be fun to share what the process looked like for us—the good, the bad, and even some of the houses we were very happy to leave behind. There were definitely a few!

Let’s go back to the beginning.

How It All Started

Like I said, we moved to the area in 1999, just three miles from the lake.

It was hard not to notice.

We drove past it all the time. On the weekends, grocery store parking lots were full of people hauling their boats home after a day on the water.

We didn’t have a boat either. But we’ve always loved being around water.

Shawn had actually spent a lot of summers on Lake Lanier as a kid, at his uncle’s lake house, where he first learned to water ski.

Living on the lake was definitely a dream. It just wasn’t a dream we could afford to think about at the time.

Within our first few years in the area, we had two babies, I quit my job to stay home with them, and Shawn started his own business.

Then came the real estate crash of 2008.

That would have been a great time to buy a lake house. Prices, along with most other real estate, had dropped significantly.

But we weren’t financially ready. And honestly, we loved our house.

By then, we’d moved even closer to the lake. We had a National Forest area right out our back door, and our neighborhood was full of friends who were in the same season of life.

We were happy where we were.

So we waited.

The First Time We Looked

A few more years passed.

We spent plenty of time looking at Zillow and driving down every lake road in the area, “investigating” and trying to figure out where we’d want to live someday.

Eventually, we decided it was time to start looking for real.

At first, we looked at a few houses on our own.

That didn’t last long.

We visited a For Sale By Owner house that looked beautiful in the listing. What we didn’t know was that the owner rented out the basement.

Looks were definitely deceiving.

The house was a disaster inside. And when we went downstairs, the tenant was sitting in a chair watching static on the television. He never looked up or said a word.

The whole thing felt like something out of a horror movie.

We laughed about it for years because it was such a strange experience.

And we decided maybe having a professional involved wasn’t such a bad idea.

Our First Agent

Our first lake-house search was fairly short-lived.

We looked at four or five houses, which was really our first experience seeing lake homes up close.

At the time, prices were climbing. We were looking at houses that cost three times what our current house was worth, were half the size, and needed a lot of work.

It wasn’t exactly selling us on lake life.

We did find one house that was smaller but nice, with a great location. It even had a pool.

It was over our budget, but it was worth investigating.

And I’m very glad I did.

I like to know who we’re going to be living near, so I did my usual research on the neighborhood.

Let’s just say I found some information that made it very easy to cross that house off the list.

The next-door neighbor had an adult son who stayed with her from time to time—and he had multiple arrests for armed robbery and burglary.

Not exactly the neighbor we were looking for.

Next.

The Pause

After that, we put the lake-house search on pause.

Life was busy. Shawn was busy with his business. And we were pretty content.

A few years went by, and when we moved again, it still wasn’t to the lake.

We moved closer to our kids’ school so they could be closer to friends and activities, and it shortened our commute.

That house was fun, too. It had a pool, and we still loved being near the water—even if it was just a pool.

We decided we’d stay there until the kids finished school.

Then we’d expand our lake-house search to different parts of Lake Lanier.

The Hunt Begins Again

As our youngest headed into her senior year of high school, we decided it was time.

We found a new agent and got all of our financing in place so that if the right house came along, we could move quickly.

I don’t know if this is true on every lake, but on Lake Lanier, good properties go quickly. They’re in high demand.

Basically, if you snooze, you lose.

We also learned something else pretty quickly:

Almost everything is a compromise.

Maybe that’s different if you’re spending two or three million dollars on a lake house. But at the price range we were looking in, there was almost always something.

Usually, it was one of two things.

You had a beautiful house that didn’t need much work, but the lot wasn’t great. Maybe the dock was in shallow water.

Or you had an amazing lot, deep water, and a great view, but the house looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 1970s.

There was almost always a trade-off.

But this time, we had an agent, our financing was ready, and we knew we were serious.

The search was on.

Our Search Experience

I’ll spare you the details of every house we looked at, but there were a few that are still memorable.

The Vacant House

This one was on the perfect road.

Great location. Dock. Deep water. Good square footage.

We walked inside. And goodness, the smell.

It was awful.

I think Haley summed it up best: “It smells like someone died in here.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Moving on.

The Double Basement

You see some quirky things on the lake, so when the listing said this house had a double basement, we weren’t particularly surprised.

The views were amazing. The water was incredibly deep. And the house was built high on a hill.

Hence, the double basement.

It was accurate. There really was a second basement.

The problem was that the lower basement only worked for me. At 5’6″, I could stand up down there.

The rest of our family, who all tower over me, couldn’t.

So that was a no.

The Hobbit House

This one had an incredible location.

South Lake. Deep water. A brand-new-looking, double-decker dock.

The trade-off was that it was going to be the smallest house we’d seen.

Before we even walked through the front door, we noticed that the front door itself looked like it was falling in.

Inside wasn’t any better.

The kitchen counters—and really, all of the counters in the house—were unusually short.

Apparently, the previous owners were all about 5’2″.

We crossed that one quickly off the list.

Those are the ones I remember most, but there were plenty of others. And honestly, looking at all those houses helped us figure out what we actually wanted.

We were open to light renovations, heavy renovations, and even a complete tear-down and rebuild.

The more houses we saw, the more we understood what mattered to us—and where on the lake we wanted to be.

The Wait Was Over

Eventually, we’d narrowed down where we wanted to live, what we were willing to compromise on, and how much renovation we were willing to take on.

Now we just had to wait for the right house to come along.

Shawn was away on business one night, and I was scrolling through Zillow in bed.

And there it was.

A new listing.

Great location. Great square footage. Dock.

And it was on one of my favorite lake roads.

I immediately called Shawn and sent him the listing. Was this the one?

We decided we couldn’t wait until he got home a few days later. So, we decided I’d go look at it without him.

He’d be home in a couple of days, and if I hated it, we could move on.

So I texted our agent, who was very gracious about my late-night message, and asked if we could see it as soon as possible.

This Was the One

At 10 a.m. the next morning, I was the third person to see the house.

From the moment I pulled down the long, private driveway, this house felt different.

I walked through the house and down to the dock.

And I knew.

This was the house we’d been looking for all those years.

It wasn’t perfect.

There were some cosmetic things that needed to be done inside. The dock needed some repairs.

But the location was right. The house was right. The lot was right (I would have lots of room for gardening).

It was the right combination for us.

After talking it over with Shawn and our agent, we made an offer.

Shawn came home a couple of days later and finally got to see it for himself.

Thankfully, he loved it, too. And after a short-lived bidding war, the house was ours.

Five Years Later

It’s hard to believe that was five years ago.

We spent more than twenty years dreaming about living on the lake, and finding the right house definitely took some patience.

There were a lot of ugly houses.

A few strange ones.

Our tradeoff? A longer walk to the dock- which feels a little like a nature walk… but let’s be honest, a bit of exercise never hurt anyone.

So, was the headache of the search worth it?

Absolutely.

We’re reminded of that all the time.

Watching the sunset from the boat. Taking the boat to dinner. Swimming off the dock. Having coffee on the porch.

These are the things we dreamed about for so long. And five years later, I still don’t take them for granted.

We’re very grateful to call this place home.

And after five years, I still love it.