Gajda Home – 31360 East Side Drive

Gajda Home 31360 East Side Drive

A log cottage built in the 1960’s right at the very tip of Point La Par, which is the South end of Sand Bay. It has beautiful sand bottom out front, but the sand point itself was washed away during the high water time in the Fall of 2019. Rather than an ordinary steel seawall, the owners decided to put the point back in place with $200,000. worth of large rocks. This makes the wave action in front of the cottage look more like the Maine Sea Coast with rocks out in front of the cottage. There will be no doubt about this cottage being safe for any future high Lake Michigan levels. From the screen porch, and in the living room of the main part of the cottage, you almost feel like you are in a boat looking out at the water. This property is made up of two separate Lake Michigan lots. The Southern lot with the cottage has 106.7 ft. of frontage around the Point. The Northern lot is 100 ft. wide with 100 ft. of sand beach frontage. It is natural sand beach and it has a created incline with a nice path down to the beach. For swimming and other beach uses, you will use the North side of the frontage. The cottage, built by Walter Wojan in the mid 1960’s, is modified log with Beaver Island cedar half-logs on the outside of the walls with standard wall construction on the inside with Beaver Island wood paneling on the interior walls. The cottage is 22.5 ft. X 28 ft. for a total of 630 sq. ft. of insulated finished living area. The house also has, on the North side, a 12 ft. X 28 ft. three season porch that can be used from late Spring through the end of October as a sitting or reading room, an outside dining area, and additional sleeping space. This makes this the perfect second home cottage for lake living. The poured concrete basement is under the whole part of the original cottage but only half of the basement has full height for easy walking around. The utility room with the pump, hot water heater and washer and dryer are in the basement area. This basement was also built as a 1960’s bomb shelter; it has a really thick poured concrete ceiling and thick concrete walls. For the last 60 years nobody thought about nuclear bomb shelters but with Putin on a rampage it might be nice to know you have one! More importantly, your views of the sunrises and moonrises at this cottage are the best on the whole East side of Beaver Island. You also see the sailboats headed for Beaver Harbor and the Mackinac Straits. This cottage is just two private bedrooms and one bathroom with a shower but there’s plenty of extra sleeping space out on the screened-in and vinyl covered porch. Someone could also use this house as a guest house and build another house on the beautiful sand beach lot to the North. The garage is large and can accommodate two cars, even though it only has one garage door opening. The owners kept outboard motorboats on trailers and canoes and kayaks in the extra part of the garage. The garage straddles the lot line of the two lots. The raw land value is over $250,000. so this house is not overpriced at the asking price of $405,000.