November 25, 2025

Dear Family and Friends,

My grandmother was a hostess. She had an entire house dedicated to Christmas décor that she proudly showed off to anybody who would take the trip over to the Krause place.

Her dining room featured two very long dining tables and one round one, and she covered them in tablecloths and fine dishware. The tables would be full of food—everything you can imagine for a huge feast. My grandmother was popular. She spent all day on the phone, sitting in the hallway attached to the wall by a cord. She would jabber on and on with her friends about gossip and whatnot. And then at the end of the call she would exclaim, “Just flash me!” I assume it meant: call when some news flash occurs, not anything to do with disrobing.

At every opportunity, it seemed my grandmother threw a party. She invited her Swedish extended family, members of the Wall family and friends from the community over for a feast.

She could usually be found sitting at the round table by the big wood-burning stove filling it with newspapers and wood to keep the dining porch warm in the winter.

My grandmother was Swedish, and Swedish people, it seems, love throwing big parties with lots of food.

My fondest memory is Thanksgiving, which was a huge feast with lots of family and friends and usually some distantly related kids.

My grandmother was a good cook. She could make anything taste good, and my favorite was her creamy mashed potatoes.

She especially loved making desserts, and there were a lot of them. Sometimes they had fruit in them, but I'm pretty sure that was the only healthy part about the dessert.

I am like my Mema, Elizabeth Kyleberg Wall, in that I have always been a hostess. I've always wanted family and friends to come together for a big party.

Like my grandma, I don't really like cleaning up too much, but I can tidy up just fine and clean it good enough so that you'll want to come over. In fact, in my experience, the only way you get a hostess to clean is to agree to come to her party.

My love of hosting was evident as a child, as I threw joint birthday parties for my brother and me despite his sometimes unwillingness to participate.

I also headed up decorating for Christmas in our house and insisted that we do family activities during the holidays.

I also learned how to be a good hostess from the Phillips’s. My best friend Jillian came from a wonderful family who loved holidays, including the food, the friends, the games, and just being around each other.

Outside of my grandmother, it seemed I was the only one in my family that was able to pull off a good party.

I went away to college, and as soon as I had even a dorm room, I started throwing parties again. And then when I got an apartment, more parties. When I got a car, I started planning trips—camping trips specifically—and then sometimes trips out of the state: road trips.

My love of hosting became a love of planning and a love of travel and organizing trips for me and my friends.

I moved to Austin, and all of that continued.

And then in 2019 I bought my first house, and I became an official Airbnb host.

I loved that first year. I opened up my two spare bedrooms, and at an affordable price, about $40 a night, I rented out my rooms to people traveling to Austin. It was so fun hosting people in my own home and getting paid for it.

In the fall of 2019, I hosted family Thanksgiving at my Austin house. Now, I could convince family to come visit—not just friends. In 2020 I lost my job, but I also hosted a family Christmas that year.  

Right after Christmas, I decide to move home to Marble Falls and rent out my Austin house full-time to be able to afford my next big project, which was remodeling my family home.

I was getting pretty burned out on the big project I had undertaken when I found some motivation in the fact that I could host Thanksgiving in Marble Falls. Lickety-split my mom and I were able to get the house finished in time for Thanksgiving to host family again.

After that, I was more motivated than ever. I made friends with another Airbnb host, learned the business from him, and then he recommended a job to me working at a short-term rental management company in Austin.

So I was able to move back to Austin and still make money hosting—now on a professional scale. In the meantime, I'd also taken on my own clients staging homes, helping manage remodels, creating listings and managing properties, as well as doing all the cleaning and maintenance for a bungalow in Clarksville, a lake house in Austin, another lake house in Point Venture/Lago Vista, a ranch in Johnson City, and another house close to mine in South Austin.

But I realized I didn't really like working for anybody. I guess I realized that I was just best learning from other people and working for myself. Whenever I worked for myself, I got excited and I got motivated, and I did a good job. Whenever I had to dutifully work for someone else for a paycheck, I just couldn't get motivated.

I started looking at buying another property. At first I was thinking about Central Texas—somewhere outside Austin like Wimberley—but a vacation to Durango shifted that perspective.

One call to my dad, and he was on board to be my investor, and we went about buying a mountain cabin at Lemon Lake just outside Durango.

I couldn't believe I might be having a second home in another state. A beautiful state where I had visited as a 12-year-old girl and several times in my recent travels.

I thought maybe I could manage the job back in Texas and spend a lot of time in Durango, but that was not the case, they wanted me in Texas. 

I decided that if I was going to have a place in Colorado but still needed to do work in Texas, specifically the Austin area, then I wanted to live somewhere that felt more like home because Austin didn't feel like home anymore.

Wimberley was too expensive, so I ventured a little further out and bought a place in Canyon Lake, Texas—a tree house with canyon views.

And then when it seemed like my plan was going to work, I got laid off.

So now I was out of a job, and I had to start making some money. So I quickly staged and listed the Canyon Lake place and realized it was not going to be home. It was going to be a money maker.

And then, with no job in Austin holding me back, I set off for Durango, and I knew even if I made trips back to Texas that Austin and Texas would never be my home again.

With nine solid weeks of work over trips to Durango from November-June and help from my mom and friendly neighbors in Sierra Verde, I was able to get the Lemon Lodge up and running in time for summer.

Then I had a choice: look for a way to stay in Durango or go back to Texas and look for a real job.

I actually had two offers. One offer was for a vacation rental management company in Durango, working part-time, one day a week.

The other was a full-time job working for VRBO in downtown Austin. Friends thought it was an easy choice: take the full-time job with benefits. I decided I'd go down there, do the interview, and see how I felt. But the ickiness I felt at the idea of spending my days in a high-rise in business attire, managing rentals that had no more personality than a Motel 6, did not sound like my idea of a good time.

So really, the choice was simple. I loaded up my Honda Pilot with my dogs and all my possessions, and I headed west for Colorado.

I learned a lot from the company I worked at that summer, but I realized again that I was never meant to work for somebody else.

So they let me know gently by firing me. LOL.

So here I was—cleaning an Airbnb, renting a temporary space in downtown Durango, and in need of money.

So I just started cleaning. Cleaning for other people, their Airbnbs, and I found out I can make good money doing it.

But at the same time somebody reached out to me through Airbnb and wanted to buy the lodge. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't even listed it, yet they offered to pay $150,000 over what I had paid. Unfortunately, the appraisal district didn't think my house was that valuable, so I didn't get quite that much. But I got enough that I was able to roll the profits and my ownership interest in the house into what is now the Animas Valley Lodge just outside the city limits of Durango.

Over the next two years, I poured every cent I had into making this funky old house that was a 1950s ranch with a 1999 addition into what is now a 5,000-square-foot lodge with four units that can sleep 25 people.

I borrowed money from both my parents, used every dime of the $100,000 I had saved for retirement in the nine-plus years I worked in the corporate world. I worked odd jobs in landscaping, cleaning, and as a restaurant server. And I managed the project—a huge remodel—on my own. I navigated doing construction while renting out a house to guests. I learned a lot, and I felt like a complete failure and completely broke so many times. But now, two years later, all four units are up and running, and the property brings in over $200,000 a year in revenue. And on top of that, the house was recently appraised and has gained $480,000 in value in two years.

I'm currently having an issue with the county because I need to get an appraiser out there to assess what my house is, because according to the code for the Animas Valley, it should be a single-family residence. And in some ways it still is. All I did was put doors on openings in the wall and put locks on the doors. The house has been rented by large groups that open up the doors and it's just one big space. The appraiser, the bank, and the county can't seem to come to a consensus, so all of my hard-earned equity is trapped.

But that's okay because I'm creative, and I plan to continue building places for people to stay that feel like home away from home.

I've had to learn how to be a businesswoman, and that means growing up, not depending too much on your parents or other people, and setting boundaries with the people that you hire, with your family and friends, and even with your guests. Because being a Superhost—which I have been every quarter since I started this business in July of 2019—doesn't mean being a dutiful and desperate property owner. It means being a boss. And sometimes being a boss looks like being a bitch.

But back to my grandma. She was a tough cookie, and she didn't take shit from anybody, and maybe I always knew that I could be warm and welcoming and also stand up for myself. So thank you, Mema, for teaching me how to be a good hostess.

Love, Meghan