It’s an old cooler plucked from the curb on garbage day, and it does leak a bit around the drain spout. But, so what, says Shingle Lake, N.S., cottager Ron Ramsey. He rectified those drawbacks by a) leaving the cooler outside on the deck, where it doesn’t matter if it leaks, and b) remaking it as an attractive piece of deck furniture. With help from daughter Carol and son-in-law Mitch Dingwell, Ramsey dressed up the ice tub by building a 2×4 frame around the sides, covering it with leftover decking, and edging it with surplus trim from the cottage interior. The handle for the lid was fashioned from a branch off the kindling pile, while the rope handles on the sides came from a beachcombing day on the Bay of Fundy. The whale emblems on the sides are the handiwork of cottage neighbour Doug McGuire. “Now, when you go over to have a beer, you feel so much better taking it out of something classy,” Ramsey says. Cheers!
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