Avisit to Crystal Palace begins with a paddle. Or, as the case may be, a brush with shoreline authorities. “Area patrolled by Black Lab Security Co.,” warns the sign affixed to a red pine at the boat launch. I’m admiring this bright metal placard, complete with a canine silhouette, when I realize my own stocky shadow has snuck off. Great. We haven’t yet slid our canoe into Ragged Lake, a secret-feeling spot in the Shield country south of Bancroft, Ont., and already we are making waves.

I find the trespasser on the deck of a nearby cottage, pestering the owner. “Not a problem,” he insists. My dog proceeds to sniff around the base of his barbecue, licking a few planks. Peering at us through a screen door, meanwhile, is the very beast we are supposed to fear—for her surveillance skills, perhaps even her shakedown abilities—although, of course, she’s not too fierce. We get off with more of a lick on the palm than a slap on the wrist and resume our short portage to the dock.

The lake, as seen on a map, is itself shaped like a dog, possibly a cougar. Let’s call it a wolf—a wolf running full-tilt, downhill, mouth ajar. We are launching from a hackle on its neck. Crystal Palace, as neighbours have playfully dubbed our destination, would be at the tip of a forepaw—on a small bay that tapers like an arrowhead. Owner Paul Webster has sent me a map with arrows drawn on by hand, along with helpful reference points, such as “big island” and “big house.” His own place is described thus: “two docks, cottage not visible from lake.”

Paul is relaxing in a weather-beaten wooden chair on one of those docks—neither of them big—as I approach. He’s a well-travelled journalist in his late 50s, with a kid in university, but he still has a boyish energy of his own. He is clad in baggy swim trunks, the kind of striped dress shirt favoured by Guided by Voices frontman Bob Pollard (another ageless wonder), and a corduroy ball cap with a smiley face on it. “Dollarama find,” he says, proudly. Tethered to the second dock is a beat-up Grumman canoe, the one Paul paddled in here a few days earlier, now loaded with some stuff to paddle out. I can’t help but notice there’s a smiley face on that, too, applied by hand.

The canoe-cottager is also a painter, and he sees a connection between his brush and paddle strokes. “I’m not a commercial artist, more of a Sunday hobbyist, but it’s a really nice way to appreciate things—to really slow it all down and just stare at it,” he says. “And, of course, canoeing in really slows it down too, because if you drive in, the landscape just flashes by. But with painting, and canoeing, there’s a pretty big Zen factor.”

Paul was living downtown Toronto some two dozen years ago when he got the itch to acquire a piece of wilderness. He started looking in the Bancroft area on the recommendation of a friend. “I went to a real estate agent in Coe Hill and asked, ‘What have you got under $15,000?’” he recalls. Soon enough, he discovered 20 boat-access acres on Ragged Lake that were available for $12,000. He and his girlfriend of the time, who became his wife, checked out the property and promptly jumped on it, wild as it was. “There was nothing here—just forest,” he says. “The first night, we put up a tent, lit a fire, had dinner, drank a bottle of wine. Then we couldn’t find the bloody tent, because the bush was so thick, and we’d forgotten to bring flashlights.”

The property remains densely treed. A “turbo-charged beaver,” as Paul describes the animal, has taken out a few cedars in recent years, but there’s still plenty of greenery to hide what’s now the main cottage building and especially its predecessor, which was finished in 1999. Paul leads me along a narrow path, up a hill. “For whatever reason, I decided to build it way back here,” he says. “I was told you have to build a hundred feet back from the lake, but I didn’t really understand the land all that well and chose this place kind of randomly.” It’s certainly a secluded spot, about twice as far inland as required by law; you’d more readily expect to find a poaching blind or a moonshining still at the end of the trail. But that just adds to the fairy tale quality of the tiny abode (fashioned long before the term “tiny abode” became a hashtag) that awaits you.

Not much bigger than your typical garden shed, but tall enough to accommodate a small loft, Paul’s first cabin is almost entirely composed of antique windows, along with a few doors, one of which is lain sideways as a wall panel. The exterior is painted a mellow yellow, and the overall feel is of a place to incubate plants or turn pots. “Freak show hippy cabin,” would be Paul’s description, although that doesn’t really capture the craftsmanship and charm of the dwelling, in which found materials are repurposed into something truly unique. “It was an experiment, made with love,” he says.

For Paul, the DIY instinct goes deep. As a 12-year-old, growing up in Toronto and in Victoria, B.C., he built his own boat—not a model, one he could actually row on the water. He also appreciates quality architecture and feels compelled to salvage any stuff that would otherwise go to waste. “I’m constantly turning over in my mind, How could I refashion this or reuse that?” he says. “I found that quirky piece of wood—what am I going to do with it?” When it came to creating the first cabin at Ragged Lake, he had already amassed a pile of potential components in the backyard of his Hogtown home. “I was living in the Annex, and there had been all these houses getting torn down and modernized, ripped apart,” he says. “I always thought it was sad to see all these old windows, hardwood staircases, all this beautiful panelling and detailing, getting gutted, so I started to collect it, beginning in 1992, from demolition sites.”

Bringing the material to the property took some effort and ingenuity, given there was only a self-propelled craft for transport. “I’ve never had a power boat here,” Paul says. “But you can get a lot in a Grumman. You can get a door in there. Or sometimes we would borrow one of the aluminum fishing boats at the landing and tow it behind the canoe. It takes a while to come in with a loaded scow behind you, but it’s no big deal. Just don’t do it into the wind.” Paul did all the work with hand tools, as the property had no power, and still doesn’t, although he gradually introduced solar panels, and a couple of years ago, he finally got a generator. He doesn’t use it much, but admits “it’s awfully nice to have a radial arm saw” for ongoing projects. “I’m a lot older than I was.”

Paul’s daughter, Rosa, was born in 2001, which got him thinking about more space to accommodate family and friends. Rather than expand the existing cabin, he opted to build a duplicate closer to the lake, yet still at a remove that would meet code requirements. Structurally and aesthetically, it was much like the first: barely 100 sq. ft., cobbled together from curbside and dumpster finds, and mostly walled with antique glass. Hence the Crystal Palace tag, and the occasional friendly tease. “We get comments like, ‘Wow, you must go through a lot of Windex,’ ” says Paul.

A third cabin, adjacent to number two, followed in 2007. This one was equally compact but more conventional, in that its windows were fewer and newer, even double-paned to retain heat. “I kind of moved away from the quirkier stuff once we had a kid,” he says. “And I ended up getting divorced, so the cottage played an important role in my staying present in her life. Her mom got the house in Toronto, so I was like, ‘This is the house that you and I share.’ I built this cabin around the idea that, ‘This place is yours.’ ”

About twenty years ago, during a period spent in Europe, Paul had an epiphany about his next architectural move. “I got the idea from Salvador Dali’s house in Spain,” he says. “He had all these fishermen’s huts that he connected together into a spacious house.” The first Ragged Lake cabin, being so far inland, would have to remain as a standalone structure, for use as a bunkie or storage, but the other two, set about five metres apart, could be readily joined. Well, it did take some work, but friends pitched in. Pines were cut on the property, their bark peeled in spring, for use as beams. Roughsawn lumber was paddled and towed over. Within a year, the two tiny abodes had been bridged into a single bigger one, and the whole exterior was painted in forest green, to blend with the surroundings. “It’s the other end of the spectrum from the multi-million-dollar Muskoka showplace, but it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life,” says Paul. “It’s kind of a dream, right?”

The expanded cottage is still smaller than most, and lacks most mod-cons, including plumbing. It’s got a kitchen for cooking but all the washing-up happens outside, with lake water heated on a propane burner and dishes scrubbed in an outdoor sink. There’s a fire pit that serves as another culinary/hospitality area, ringed with counters topped in marble and granite, all castoffs from urban home renos. The bathroom is an outhouse, but far nicer than your average kybo, featuring stained glass and other decorative touches, including antique lanterns. Paul says this helped his daughter and her friends get over the ick factor when they were younger.

Rosa, now 22, has become more involved in the Ragged Lake experiment over the past decade, contributing paintings of her own to the cottage walls, alongside her dad’s and other works of art and decor that they both agree on. “This summer, she came up with her boyfriend, and that’s the first time she ever came up without me,” says Paul. “So there’s a nice transition happening where she’s taking ownership of it, and she seems to love the place.”

Others do too. You can see why. For all its ramshackle, recycled elements, Crystal Palace is an art piece in itself. Even the unused porch pillars and newel posts that lean against the cottage feel artfully placed. Door knockers shaped like lions’ heads are attached to a wall, while an oval plate from an American Beauty woodstove is screwed to a door. Duck decoys occupy a shelf, with a carved turtle between them. The rafters are jammed with wooden skis and hockey sticks, along with countless other retro treasures found at yard sales or fished from garbage bins. Flagstones from the old Windsor Arms Hotel in Yorkville form an outdoor staircase and bricks brought over by canoe are now sunken in the earth, making for medieval-feeling footpaths.

In The Glass Castle, memoirist Jeanette Walls describes a rootless and chaotic upbringing, with the title referring to a solar-powered dream home that her quixotic (and probably bipolar) dad talks about building but never does. Paul’s parents, both university profs, provided a more stable existence, but they were also idealistic, in their way, and thrifty. “My parents were garbage-pickers,” says Paul. “I hardly grew up in poverty—we were middle-class people—but their parents lived through the Depression, particularly on my mother’s side, so they had that ethos of waste not, want not, and don’t buy it if you can get it from the garbage.”

The family was not flush (or inclined) enough to send their kids to private camps, but Paul did attend a “1970s nature camp” in the Haliburton area and later worked as a tree-planter. In each case, he slept in a tent, and got used to the idea of rudimentary living amid nature. “I would go to other people’s cottages, with expensive boats and posh houses, where you can’t get any sand in the boathouse even,” he says. “I’ve always veered toward the rustic side. And I do kind of get off on being a little exposed to the elements. There’s a certain bracing quality of, like, I’m going to have to canoe out of here and there’s a gale coming in—am I going to get out? Probably, but it can be touch and go.”

A couple of years ago, Paul decided to list his place on Hipcamp, a kind of Airbnb for folks who don’t mind roughing it a bit, as a way to help pay his daughter’s tuition. The uptake has been considerable, the reviews flattering. One guest described his setup as “eclectic.” All of this came as a bit of a surprise to the dumpster-diving cottager, but also as an affirmation.

“I assumed people wouldn’t be interested,” he says. “But it turned out to be validation, to some degree, of the artsy, expressive part of this place. People are saying, ‘I love what you did,’ and that has a special feel, because it’s not a place that I just bought. I built it mostly by hand; it’s tied into my identity. When people say they like it, it’s like, Hey, they like my art.” He pauses for a moment, then adds: “It’s a small kind of pleasure that it gives other people pleasure too.”

There might be another project at Ragged Lake before Paul hangs up his hammer or retires his radial arm. It may not be strictly necessary, but being the dreamer he is, he can’t help but consider one more way to expand Crystal Palace, while also involving his daughter and further proving—unlike the dad in The Glass Castle—that some wild schemes can come true.

“The work is mostly done, but I might build a little bunkie along the shore somewhere,” he muses. “Rosa thinks it would be a good idea, and I might do it with her.” Should the two roll up their sleeves together, “I have lots of pillars and old antique doors and stuff stashed under the cabin.”

Jim Moodie winters in Sudbury, Ont., and summers on Panache Lake.