This old cottage is like a ship. Walk across the slightly tilted floor, and the whole structure creaks to mark your passage. In a high wind, the corners keen a moaning sound that makes me think of a gale blowing through the rigging.
When we bought it, the adult children of the previous owners told us how much their parents had loved the place, and their mother’s parents before that. My brother did the paperwork on the deal, and when it was done, the two siblings handed him a bottle of brandy. They told him they wanted the new owners to toast their parents the night they moved in. “We buried their ashes under the fireplace last week,” they told him.
So there’s that.
I’m not worried about ghosts, but if they existed, our cottage on Christie Lake in Ontario’s Tay Valley would be the sort of place that attracted them. The first version of the cottage was built sometime around the start of the 20th century, but it is nothing like that original structure now. A cottage like ours has gone through change upon change, refinements and alterations to suit each family that held it. Like most old cottages, you can mark the passage of years throughout the place.
After owning it for a dozen years or so, we decided to renovate, a process which peeled back the history of the building written in its walls.
The renovations were somewhat overdue. My wife had taken to telling people about our “shack.” How it had a fantastic view but was, “very, very basic.”
Five ways to build a cottage that will last a lifetime
Talking about the state of the cabin around the fire one night, my buddy, the head of design and construction for one of the world’s biggest restaurant chains, asked me what I would do to the cottage if I were to make any changes. I turned the question back on him and asked what he would do if it were his. He put down his beer and went up to the cottage to grab his laptop. In 10 minutes, he had worked up something for us to look at and the design was passed from friend to friend gathered around the flames.
And so yet another iteration of the cottage came about. A crew was formed from my high school friends that night who’d made the mistake of saying “I’m in” when the plan was hatched: a surgeon and his soon-to-be doctor son; the CEO of one of Canada’s biggest media companies; a chemical engineer; a mechanical engineer; my university-aged son; and the aforementioned designer. Everyone gave a week or a few days of their time in exchange for beer and food and tall tales around the fire. And most of them did it again the following year and the next as the renovations continued.
As we peeled away at the structure, we’d stop and gather whenever someone uncovered an exterior wall somewhere inside the cottage, a marker of its previous incarnation. We found the white clapboard that originally clad the cottage hidden inside a closet wall, in the hall outside the bathroom, and between the kitchen and the living room. Gradually we determined its original shape—a small structure with a woodstove and perhaps enough room for a bed and a chair. Then came a kitchen and later a bathroom to replace the privy that sat somewhere outside.
The renovations confirmed something that we had long suspected. The middle years of the cottage featured a porch around two sides that was gradually made permanent—screens replaced by glass, wooden walls constructed between posts—until the porch became a bedroom and a living room.
Seeing exterior features on the inside is like touching a live wire and getting a jolt of pure history. You can’t help but think about the people who were here before: the first resident, sleeping in a single bed next to the woodstove in the original one-room shack; the family a few generations later, listening to the loons, chatting and laughing on a hot July night as bugs bounced off the big screens of the porch.
Should I enlist my friends to help with cottage renovations?
One time a visitor gazed up at the ceiling of that former outside porch and told me that he liked the look of the “reclaimed” wood we had used. I was pleased to tell him that the wood was original and the deep ox-blood colour of the wide wooden slats was the imprint of around 100 years of cigarette smoke and frying bacon.
I love the history that lives through the building. The fireplace is tight and ordered above ground, but go down to the crawl space, and you see it is built on top of what is essentially a pile of rocks pushed together to make enough bulk to support the brick structure above.
It is functional. Practical. The sort of place where you don’t need to take your shoes off when you come in. I’ve been to cottages that look like homes directly transplanted from a big-city suburb, complete with a lawn to mow, hedges to trim, and shiny bits to keep buffed. That’s not for me.
It would feel somehow wrong to ask your buddies to work on a place like that. It would be like asking them to come stay with you in the city and saying, “Hey, let’s build an extension while you are here.” It’s not the same.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d put our Not-Up-to-Code crew (named in honour of the frequent comment from our resident electrical wiring expert) up against any equivalent group of professionals. The work they did on the place was incredible.
Seeing my restaurant designer friend carefully measuring and cutting a board that was going to be covered up by a wall, I asked him why he bothered. Why not just eyeball it and leave it rough?
He replied that one day someone would renovate the place again, and he wanted that person to know that the job had been done well.
Five renovation projects every cottager should tackle themselves
My friend the chemical engineer, like me, limited to minor jobs while our more skilled friends did the real work, was assigned to finish up a corner wall. Before he nailed on the last slats to close it off, he reached in with a permanent marker and signed his name and wrote the date on a stud. The more experienced renovators shook their heads at this sentimentality, but I have to admit to doing the same thing a few days later when I built a new wall in the bedroom.
I like to think that during some future renovation a few decades from now, someone will stop and look and wonder about the people who came before.
My wife doesn’t call it the shack anymore. When she saw the changes, she voiced her approval. It’s still rustic, but in a good way.
We’ll keep working on it, if for no other reason than it is a good excuse to get the gang together every summer. This little cabin has been a work in progress for generations, and I suspect it always will be.
Time is like a river, and if this old cottage is a ship, we’re only on board for a short while.
This article was originally published in the March/April 2023 issue of Cottage Life.
Related Story Check out the ingenious way this cottager repurposed an old propane barbecue
Related Story An ambitious restoration of their historic Thousand Islands cottage brought this family back together
Related Story How we brought a rusted, vintage woodstove back to life