Sandy Beach Cottage am Torch Lake in Alden

This was a hard week for us as owners to see our property be mistreated. We had multiple complaints from our neighbors regarding these renters and so yes we were trying to keep the peace. As far as us being "intrusive" this was the exact type of renters that our location is not suited for. If you are looking to come party and be so drunk that we have to go over at midnight and tell you stop screaming "f--words" at the top of your lungs and threaten your friend to a fight then this place is not for you. We came over to stop the fight and save our house from being destroyed. This is a close nit family friendly area and the houses are original to the lake and on small land parcels. On top of that they are also the reason that we now do not allow smoking anywhere on our property...ANYWHERE. We had multiple complaints from multiple neighbors regarding noise and smoking from this group. You were not 500 feet away since the plot of this land is only 80 front feet of lake front . Your smoke was constantly wafting up into our home and our neighbors making it awful for us. Not to mention the fact that our place was trashed from them staying with us. Our cleaning lady needed an extra person and more money just to get it clean again. As far as the kids go, we have multiple families that rent from us that have families of their own and we have become friends with and our kids go in between both cottages to play. We try our hardest to give everyone the privacy they would like, but 9 time out of 10 we end up hanging out or becoming friends with our renters given to close proximity to all of our cottages on our street. Our little boy (at the time 2) did not quite understand oh this house he can normally go in it’s always inviting. We understand that not every one wants kids by them on an adult only vacation but since all the houses near by have multiple kids, you have to be aware of your actions. The only reason we were "intrusive" was because of the concern for treatment of our property and the complete lack of any sort of adult responsibility or behavior from this group. At the beginning of this last rental season we did have a few plumbing/ maintenance issues that we had a difficult time getting fixed since we had just switched property managers. The sooner we know about the problem the faster it can be fixed. As far as we know everything is fixed and working. That is never fun to have those problems on vacation, but this is an old original cottage. The s

To start off there are no bed bugs in the house, and never have been. There however can be swimmers itch in the lake, like many inland lakes in Michigan as the water warms up swimmers itch can show up, mostly in the shallows, unfortunately where kids tend to play the most. This is why the bumps only showed up on her grand kids and not anyone else in there group. Not to mention that no one else have ever mentioned bed bugs and would be an on going issue in the reviews if there were any. As far as the safety issue it is so far blown out of portion its crazy. The door at issue is an exterior screen door to a screened in porch. The handle on it did break this year, it is an antique door and I have had to special order the part to fix it. I even explained this to them that it would not be able to be fixed while they were there. The main interior door to the lake side functions more than properly to prevent any sort of safety issue for kids. The fenced in back yard is "shared" with our cottage next door and a renter this year put up the chicken wire on there own accord since they had a potentially aggressive dog they wanted to keep separate. I decided to leave it for the rest of the season so there was some separation of the yards since we allow dogs at both places. For next season we will be doing a more permanent/better solution for separating the two back yards.