The Maple Mansion

“Where am I going this weekend you ask? I’m going up to The Maple Mansion.” “That sounds fancy, where is it? I tried to google it, but I couldn’t find anything.”

The number of colleagues and co-workers who have tried to google The Maple Mansion after I’ve talked about it makes me chuckle. I’ve had a version of the conversation above at least six or seven times. I finally decided to give those folks something to google.

The Origin Story

Twelve years ago my wife and I were planning on having our first child. We wanted to move out of Grand Rapids proper, and so the hunt for a new home began. The goal was to buy a home on 10-20 acres. That whole process was a nightmare, but suffice it to say that after two years, twenty-one offers, and quickly rising home prices, we found ourselves in the suburbs on a .33 acre lot. At the time my wife was pregnant and we just couldn’t afford a house with land. To help us cope with this fact we agreed we would just have to wait until some day in the future when we could afford to buy a separate piece of ground.

Fast forward seven years. My wife and I had better jobs and a decent amount of equity in our home due to the continued ridiculous rise in home values. I had been looking at hunting properties online for sometime. A listing I had been interested in came back on the market, but this time in our price range! It was a 40 acre parcel in northern Michigan and less than two hours from our home. We packed up the kids, we had two by this time, and went to take a look. There was an old run down building on the property that we couldn’t get into so we came back the next week and had the realtor open it up.

The “cabin” was in rough shape. There were multiple leaks in the roof and the smell was almost unbearable despite a plethora of dyer sheets hanging from the walls. We learned from the realtor a prior deal had fallen through on the property when a buyer was denied financing because of the legal access. The only way to get to this property was a 1/4 mile long two-track that went through two other properties. There was legal access to the property, but not where the two-track was. Instead, the legal access was on the other side of the property through 1/4 mile of forest with no road.

I’m pretty sure the realtor just wanted to be done with this property because when we said we wanted to make an offer he told us not to be afraid to make a low one. When pressed harder he told us what the seller’s low number was, so we made an offer for $5,000 under that. The legal access was also on my mind. I didn’t like my ability to access my property based on a handshake agreement with two other landowners I didn’t know. They could, at any time, change their mind and block our way in. There also was no way to ensure this agreement would remain if either party decided to sell their place in the future. When we wrote up our purchase offer we required the legal access be changed to the existing two-track. The seller agreed to hinge the whole deal on making the two-track the legal easement. No one knew it at the time, but getting the easement changed would drag the process out for over a year and almost sink the whole deal.

We made our offer in early February 2021. Covid was still disrupting society, and the real estate market was crazy. The first step in getting the legal access changed was to have the other property owners to sign a document agreeing to the change. It turned out that meant getting eight signatures from people as far away as Florida. Once those signatures were collected paperwork had to be filled with county. Local governments were working with skeleton crews around this time, and every time paperwork had to be filed it would take what seemed like forever. The next step was to get a surveyor to come out and survey the road. At this point surveyors were scheduling three months out because of the crazy real estate market. The two-track finally got surveyed in late August. Then it was time to wait on more paperwork and see if the local governments would accept the change. Since we weren’t going to close before deer season, I got permission to hunt the property and messed up a chance at a nice 8-point.

October, November, and most of December came and went with no word about the access. I called the real estate agent for an update, something I had been doing every few months. He would explain everyone was blaming covid for things taking so long. This time he didn’t know why we hadn’t heard anything about the easement being accepted, and I left that conversation thinking it probably wouldn’t work out.

In addition to getting permission to hunt that fall, I had also gotten permission to work on the cabin that summer before we closed. By December I had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars ripping out walls and re-doing the roof. My wife and I knew when we decided to put this kind of time and money into this property there was no guarantee the deal would go through. It was time to have the conversation with my wife I was hoping I would never have to have. I explained that I didn’t think we were going to get the place after all and we might need to start looking for another place. We were both pretty bummed as she took me to our storage room and pulled out a box. “I was going to give this to you at Christmas, but I might as well show it to you now since we probably won’t be able to use it,” she said. In the box was a custom metal sign with deer on it that said Maple Mansion Est 2021.

We started looking for new properties but never completely gave up hope. Finally, in February 2022 I was at an all you can drink mimosas breakfast in Vegas when I got a call out of the blue from the realtor. He called to tell me everything was done and we could set up a closing date! I didn’t have any luck at the blackjack tables, but at least I found some at breakfast.

Why we call it The Maple Mansion

When our offer was first accepted we started coming up with names for the place. As we came up with one we tried it out. The Back 40. The Sugar Shack. The Cabin. The one that stuck was The Shitty Shack. It certainly was accurate and catchy, but we quickly ran into trouble when referring to the property as The Shitty Shack around our young kids! There are tons of maple trees on the property so with our tongues firmly in our cheeks we settled on The Maple Mansion. We were a little concerned our three year old would grow up confused about what a mansion is, but you can’t win’em all.