In 2016, Diane Ferguson retired from her job as a paralegal at a Tallahassee, Florida, law firm. The then-45-year-old was unsure of her next life move. So she took up residence in a Clifton Lagoons boathouse that her mother, a Rocky River native, had inherited from her parents. She’d considered the structure — one of 30 townhouse-style boathouses located within view of where the Rocky River empties into Lake Erie — a truly magical place ever since she was a kid growing up in Chicago.

“Wherever my little family was — my mom, dad and older brother — we came here and stayed at the boathouse every summer and most Christmases,” Ferguson recalls. “It was always about visiting family.”

That fall, Ferguson and her father bought the boathouse next door at a sheriff’s sale with the intent of teari

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