Love Shack
Sue Daley fell for the battered beach cottage first. Then for the man who fixed it.
“It was a love shack,” Daley says. “We fell in love with this place and we fell in love with each other and we all grew up together.”
To be fair, they were already casually dating when she bought the Erie, Pa., cottage 36 years ago. But it wasn’t until the cottage came along that the relationship turned serious.
It was Jim McEnery’s engineering skill and vision, along with their hard work and tenacity, that transformed the one-season decrepit beach house into a magical lakefront home where its owners can watch the color and texture of the sky and Lake Erie change season after season, day after day and hour to hour. “I watched the sunset here on some steps and I was sold,” she says.
Daley, then 21, bought the tiny one-room beach house for $5,000 after asking her father — a Navy captain who understood well the lure of the water — to loan her the $500 down payment. For a year she lived there alone without regular running water. In the winter, her heat came from a cast iron wood stove. There was no insulation.
“I’d come home from work and the water jugs would be frozen solid by the fireplace because the fire had gone out,” she says.
Those hard winter days are hard to imagine now as Daley and McEnery lead a barefoot tour of their colorful hideaway, plastic glasses of white wine in hand, the windows and doors flung open to embrace the lake breeze.
Getting here is half the fun: To find their cottage, visitors park on a small dirt driveway then walk north to the bluff. From there you see the first glimpse of the seafoam green cottage, tucked 120 steps below.
It’s romantic, until you imagine carrying stuff all the way down to the front door. But after 36 years of doing just that, McEnery shrugs at the inconvenience.
“You carry the groceries down and the garbage up,” McEnery says. They have been creative in getting some of the heavier items down the steep hill. For instance, the cast-iron clawfoot tub in the one-bedroom cottage was brought in by toboggan in the middle of winter.
The tub and other items in the house were “rescued” by McEnery — who is a licensed ship captain and works as a remodeling contractor — from construction sites. The tub came from a home for retired soldiers that was being demolished. The solid oak doors were bought for $2 each at an auction of a school that was coming down. The crystal chandelier over the kitchen table came from a house that was being remodeled. Even the beams in the walls have been recycled, taken from the site of a torn-down dance hall. The firewood burned in the two stoves in the colder months comes from driftwood washed up on their private beach another few dozen steps down from the cottage’s deck.
It’s down on the beach that you can truly appreciate how much hard work they have put into this isolated cottage. Numerous cement walls, most poured by hand, literally hold up the bluff where the cottage is perched, protecting it from the sometimes rough waters of Lake Erie.
The cottage next door didn’t have the same protection. It’s gone now, swept one winter night into the lake. Daley and McEnery purchased that property after the house was destroyed and McEnery built a wooden walkway over to the land. Herbs flourish along the path and the foundation of the washed-away cottage is now Daley’s flower garden. A metal boat that once washed ashore was hauled partway up the hill and has been filled with dirt and planted with vegetables.
Daley calls this spot her secret garden.
While the summer here is magical, each season hold its charms. For McEnery, winter is his favorite time. He’s watched coyotes romp on the ice and has camped overnight on the frozen water.
Those frigid days seem far away while sitting on a wooden bench overlooking the garden and the lake below, listening to Daley talk about how important the cottage is to her.
“I feel blessed,” she says.
Daley is a clinical psychologist and the director of the personal counseling office at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. She’s worked there 18 years, but it wasn’t until the past year that she garnered national attention.
Why? Well, it’s not really she who is famous, Daley explains. It’s Ernie, the couple’s 3-year-old affenpinscher, a 9-pound dynamo who has his own Ernie-sized Adirondack chair at the cottage and his own fan club at Behrend. A licensed service dog, he spends his days with Daley at work, welcoming students to the counseling center and doling out wiggly love and comfort as needed. He became a national star after he was featured on an Animal Planet show called “Dogs 101” in 2010.
“Everybody loves Ernie,” Daley says, as the little black dog races by on the beach, a stick in his mouth, his nose coated with sand.
Back inside — with Ernie flopped down in front of an open door — the tour continues. The house is as compact as a ship’s cabin. Every space is utilized. Storage space is even tucked into the mudroom steps.
Glass jars of jewel-colored glass and other beach treasures decorate every surface. Beautiful, one-of-a-kind driftwood and rock sculptures crafted by a neighbor who’s a local artisan are prominently displayed. There are three decks in all — one off the living room, another off the one bedroom, and the third at the top of the house.
Daley has chosen a bright palette of paint for the walls — sunny yellow, apple green, dreamy blue and mandarin orange. The color combinations work as a fitting frame to the view of water outside that stretches forever.
“The real world is very close,” Daley says. “But down here, we feel like we’re on our own island.”