Our final lunch at the lake was on a warm fall day, standing around on the deck. Blue sky almost too bright to look at, holding back a sheet of grey clouds. This was the last time my extended family were together at our old cottage, the place my grandfather helped to build on Go Home Lake, Ont., in the early 1960s, the cottage that is now demolished.
“Demolished” or “demo’d” is a less painful way of saying we smashed the cottage he built into 10,000 tiny pieces, turning it into a pile of rubble and erasing it from the earth, from the place where it stood upright (more or less) for more than 60 years. We—and by “we,” I mean a local contractor—tore it down to make way for an eventual new cottage, a slightly larger and more structurally sound one. Consider it a doubling down on my grandfather’s cottage vision. But, despite our collective excitement about the new place, the destruction of the old one was still sad, as I’m sure readers of this magazine can imagine.
Nobody wants to face the prospect of tearing down their beloved family cottage. On the list of topics people would rather not think about, it’s buried under forest f ires and forced buyouts. Even as we removed the last keepsakes from the old cottage, I tried to ignore the utter annihilation that was about to happen. But then it did happen, forcing our family to face the rebuild in all its gory paperwork and permit-laden detail. If something similar should ever happen to you and your getaway, I hope this account of our old cottage’s last few months will give you the tools needed to face demolition head on.
Letting go
Despite the excitement around building our new place, there was still a twinge of loss. But my grandfather Bill probably would have seen it differently. He was a scientist and a builder, a tinkerer and a fixer.
“Bill was very practical,” says his daughter Sarah Paul, my aunt. “He would have been—from a practical sense, if the building was coming to the end of its life—totally fine with it,” she says of the demolition.
“He would’ve been dwelling on the building of the future,” his oldest daughter, my mom, Lissa Paul says. He would’ve loved that my daughter—his great-granddaughter—enjoys being up there, and he would have especially loved that his granddaughter, a budding architect, is designing our new place.
Bill was too smart to imagine his original cottage would last forever. Together with a local builder, he helped make the original one-room shack in the early 1960s using wood from his father-in-law’s lumber yard in Toronto and a mismatched assortment of found windows, a fact my grandmother never forgave. He built it, from what I understand, to be an ongoing project and a staging ground for family life, quiet and loud.
“The cottage in nature, being made of wood, is susceptible to it,” my uncle Marden, Bill’s son, says. “I mean, one of his lines to me was: ‘The most important lesson of biology is that all living things die.’ ”
It’s only because a cottage is not a living thing that we are granted this (kind of amazing) ability to raze and remake it.
And so, after much debate and careful consideration, the three siblings—Lissa, Marden, and Sarah Paul, to whom Bill passed on the cottage—decided to remake it to last, if not forever, then at least into the 22nd century.
The cottage pre-demolition. Photo courtesy Matt Bubbers and Troy Wolf
Planning and permitting
While letting go of the old cottage takes time, planning and permitting takes patience.
Like the old adage goes: measure twice, smash once. Months before the excavator knocked it down, a surveyor came in to document the old building and property. A detailed survey is often necessary for getting a demolition permit, but even if it wasn’t, a survey is a must if you’re planning to rebuild.
“If the building benefits from any legal non-complying status, it is always a good idea to start with a survey to legally document those conditions which may be applicable to redevelopment,” says Nick Snyder, the chief building official at the Township of Muskoka Lakes. In other words, if your old cottage bent a few rules and got away with it, make sure you have a good record if you want to continue bending them.
You don’t need to have all the plans for your rebuilt cottage approved before demolition, although it certainly wouldn’t hurt, but you will likely need a demolition permit. In Muskoka Lakes, for example, you require one any time you’re knocking down a building larger than 108 sq. ft. (10 m2), says Snyder. Demo permits can be relatively cheap— usually $100 to $200, varying by township—but they typically come with a list of additional requirements (see “What You’ll Need for a Demo Permit,” below).
Do it yourself vs. do it with money
Once the paperwork is in order, it’s time to get your hands dirty. Or not. A DIY demolition wasn’t in the cards for our family’s cottage. We did some minor work—carefully removing the old floors to reuse later and saving big chunks of the original wood siding—but a full DIY demolition would’ve been too time-consuming. That said, if you have the time, strength, and basic understanding of how buildings go together, which is important for safely tearing them apart, doing the demo work yourself could save serious money.
Two different contractors with extensive experience around Georgian Bay and Muskoka told me a demolition job on a small 1,000 to 1,500 sq. ft. cottage on the mainland with road access would cost between $20,000 to $30,000, including removal of materials and cleanup. Demo costs are largely dependent on access, so if that same cottage was on an island, it could cost around $30,000 to $50,000 because equipment needs to be barged in and material needs to be barged out. And, of course, the bigger the structure, the higher the price.
“But this ending “DIY demo is one of the ways that you can definitely save money on your cottage job,” says Troy Wolf. He’s the founder and owner of Wolf Construction and Services, based in Port Severn, Ont., and the contractor responsible for our demo and rebuild. Demolition is physical work, he says, and if you’re renting a machine—like an excavator—to do it yourself, get comfortable with the controls before you rip into a building.
If you take the DIY approach, you’ll still have to budget for the disposal of materials. The cost ranges wildly. York1, a private waste management company with a transfer station in Bracebridge, Ont., charges about $200 per tonne. At a municipal dump in Kawartha Lakes, demolition waste is $145 per tonne. In the township of West Grey, it can be up to $450 per tonne.
Photo courtesy Matt Bubbers and Troy Wolf
Andrew Ashcroft, the owner-operator of Right Angle Construction in Coldwater, Ont., says a typical 1,500-sq.-ft. cottage could amount to roughly 30 tonnes of materials, in which case, you’d be looking at a bill of anywhere from $5,000 to $14,000 for waste disposal alone.
Any metal—ducts, wiring, water tanks—can be pulled out and recycled, but every- thing else will likely be headed for the incinerator or a landfill.
Finally, you’ll want to consider development charges. They can add up to tens of thousands of dollars, paid to local governments to cover infrastructure costs, such as roads, utilities, and upkeep. These charges are typically meant for new developments though, so if you’re demolishing and rebuilding on the same property within a certain number of years (it varies based on township and district), you may be able to get the development charges credited back in full. In other words: you pay nothing. Again, be sure to check the fine print with your local building office.
Timing and timeline
The good news about demolition is that it can be quick, if not quite painless. Our cottage came crashing down and was cleared away in 12 days.
To be safe, plan at least one month to get the utility disconnects, demolition, and clean-up completed, or two months if the cottage is water-access only, says Wolf. But more time is better. Electricity service, for example, usually takes about one or two weeks to disconnect. The utility provider has to schedule a crew to come out and physically disconnect the power line from your property and coil it up safely. It’s a similar story for municipal water service, although that’s admittedly much less common for cottages.
Photo courtesy Matt Bubbers and Troy Wolf
Bear in mind too that noisy demolition work is often only permitted at certain times of day, so check with local bylaws. (Between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays is common.) You may also want to build some goodwill with the neighbours by giving them a heads up about the demolition.
This being Canada, weather can always delay things too. Ashcroft had one job last year where it took six months just to get the electrical service disconnected; a spring ice storm caused major infrastructure damage and Hydro One crews were busy trying to fix everything. So, it pays to plan ahead and get these things in motion early.
Between May and November is the best time of year to demolish, says Ashcroft. It’s after the roads dry up but still before lakes freeze over, which makes it easier to get trucks and machinery in and out.
Deconstruction
What to keep and what to get rid of from an old cottage is a personal choice. Some owners may want to deconstruct parts of the structure—rather than simply demolish and smash everything—in order to preserve the valuable or sentimental pieces, says Ashcroft. But unless you’re doing the deconstruction, storage, and refinishing of old materials yourself, paying a contractor to do it will cost around the same as buying new material, he says.
The items in our cottage mainly had sentimental rather than monetary value. We pulled up the engineered-wood flooring, as well as small pieces of the exterior wood siding, which we’ll reuse in the new place. Among other odds and ends, we also kept a heavy, old coffee table bought by my grandmother. It was a platform for board games, books, puzzles, and movie night snacks for as long as I can remember, and it will continue to be.
Photo courtesy Matt Bubbers and Troy Wolf
As for the rest, my aunt Sarah posted on our lake’s Facebook page, offering free furniture and appliances. Anything good that remained she tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to get a furniture bank to take.
Shortly after that, in November 2025, my grandfather’s cottage was reduced to rubble. But this ending isn’t a sad one because it isn’t an end at all. In a year or two, we’ll have our first lunch at the new cottage, out on the new deck, all together. We’ll eat Bill’s usual meal: peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches. And, hey, don’t knock it ’till you try it; he was really on to something with the chewy and crunchy, just like he was really on to something with this spectacular plot of land on Go Home Lake.
Matt Bubbers is a regular Cottage Life contributor. He also writes for the Globe and Mail.
What you’ll need for a demo permit
The requirements for getting a demolition permit depend on where you cottage; check with your local building department before you swing a sledgehammer.
1. A building permit application. Although we’re talking about demolition, the application is typically the same, albeit simplified. (For example, with a demolition, you obviously won’t need to provide architectural and engineering plans as you would for new construction.)
2. A site plan showing where the structure is on the property. The plan should provide the size, area, and height of the structure to be removed; its proximity to other structures, sewage systems, and overhead wires; and lot lines. The plan should note any structures that will remain.
3. Some townships want a floor plan of the existing structure and a building elevation, but this is typically only when the demolition is required to make way for a new structure.
4. Any connections to services such as hydro, municipal water or sewer, and gas. Some jurisdictions will want signed proof from utility providers that those services have been disconnected before demolition.
5. Some townships may also ask to see a plan for how you will dispose of the demolished building. It could be as simple as naming the waste disposal company hired for the job.
This story originally appeared in our Early Spring ’26 issue.
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