The change of life...

Back to work in September, 2009, ending up one home and creating another.  Our current home was in a great state for showing and the pool and big, treed lot displayed nicely for the end of August and all of September..... but it didn't sell until March.  Which was actually a good thing... the cottage needed everything done - asap - just to make it habitable for good weather, let alone a Canadian lakefront winter.  Almost immediately we cleared and cleaned it out, having a yard sale of what we wanted to get rid of from both houses, giving and selling some to friends, relatives.  We were lightening the physical load of a two children, 35 year marriage from a 2000 square foot ranch with full basement, 2.5 garage and attics to 1650 square feet, no basement, no garage (but a shed the size of a single garage).

Of course, we were taking pictures right and left, each pre-project, during-project, post-project.  Looking back, the one constant non-human item in all pictures, the one eternal presence - wine, followed by beer.  The amount of wine I went through.... the days were work, followed by three to five hours more work, after work.  If family or friends came over, a break was a godsend.  And this past year, a certain trio of friends kept me, well, sane enough that no one came to harm.  Never underestimate southern Ontario, North Shore wines.... excellent choices, therapeutic almost.

We investigate federal and provincial programs for energy refits and make the appointment for an energy audit.  The auditor erected his barriers and fans, amazed at the tightness of the old place, while shaking his head at what was in front of us. We received a report, with a list and guidelines of what should be done, what we could get back from our energy upgrades.  Almost all of the money we spent in insulation comes back, so that cost paid for itself and again.  Toilets - we were turning the miscellaney room into a third bath, so buying three dual flush, water efficient toilets would return about 40% of their cost.  The hot water heat of the cottage, running perfectly up to the crack of the boiler, would run efficiently again with the installation of a 96% energy efficient boiler installed in November and would return a large portion of its' cost.  Sometimes I like to just open the boiler room door and look at that little white box mounted on the wall.  The large, rusting electric water tank would be replaced by an on-demand tankless heater and pay us back a good chunk of the cost.  These were the major rebates, even the audit itself was rebated.  At this date, November 2010, we've done all that except the tankless water heater and that'll be in before the end of the year.

Every day after work, I'd change and come down to the lake.  Kee would be here already.  He'd dig out and mud cracks, day after day.  In the front bedroom, almost the entire lakeside wall was ripped back and back, then rebuilt, replastered, sanded, and then repeated to Kee's satisfaction, then painted.  Room after room, I'd follow his work.  I'd get a room painted and then come home to find fresh mud on my fresh paint.... exasperated, I called him my "crack whore".  He sees cracks everywhere, was obsessed and possessed by the cracks.  We go through tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs of mud. 

Then our son, D, a chip off his dad's skilled trade block, rewires the entire house, saving us thousands of dollars.  He's up in the attics, under the house in the dirt-floored crawlspace, running cables, drilling holes, rough blueprinting a re-wire of the entire house.  D puts in outlets, breaker-style, where there are none, co-axial outlets everywhere, the new electrical panel grows and grows.  While not an electrician, when we get the official inspection done, everything has been done perfectly and to code.... he's amazing.

After buying the house - I swear, after buying it, I noticed - there were no outlets in the small bath off the master.  How could that be?  D put that right, along with outlets down the halls, in closets, all, and I mean all, over the kitchen.  Kee follows with his mud pail, I follow with the paint.

In the time between August and March, we work on the cottage, keep the current home prepped and continue on with life on three fronts:  cottage, home, work.  My sister, owner of a busy quilting, embroidery, high end sewing machine store, lends us her large van she uses for travelling to trade shows.  That, along with the shed, the newer end bedrooms and my father-in-law's basement are soon filled with "stuff-in-transition"... things that will be used, things that need to be given to our kids, stuff that needs to disappear.  As we move into the cottage, some will come down to the lake - into the house, into the shed.  The piano goes straight to Kee's dad, to be used first by his sister's kids, then given to our daughter, for her and her baby daughters' use.  I can only play "Good King Wenceslas" and don't know how to stop.

The fall nights darken early and it's month after month of a 20 minute ride at dusk, change at home, work until 9 or 11, close up, go home, shower or just pj it and fall unconscious.  Small peaks, like finishing a room, a floor, seeing the insulation go in, are checkpoints of accomplishment.

Hallowe'en passes.  One brave treater knocks on the door... I'm sure Kee looked like a chainsaw massacre plasterer when he answered.  He tells me, "all I could have offered her was a Coors Lite".

The fireplace burns each night, with fans helping circulate warm air in the unheated house.  As the winter progresses and the lake winds pick up, we add heater fans, not only to warm us, but to dry the plaster.  Pictures of bundled up visitors, holding wine, looking cold.....  In the living room, there is only a large threadbare oriental rug, two good quality, old armchairs left behind and a low rustic coffee table.  We cluster these around the fireplace.  Our diet is reduced to telephone and car food - order it or pick it up.  I love to cook, but am too tired, still, I make a good meal on Sundays, at home.  I'm determined that life at our current house will be regular, if in appearance and Sunday meals only, until we leave.

Christmas for my side of the family is at our house - our last Christmas here - and there's no time for nostalgic, lingering moments, but mention is continually made of our last Christmas here, the 25th one.  At the cottage, a ceramic tree lights up a window.  New Year's..... 2010....

... at first sight

The first thing you noticed outside the cottage was the size of the property... we were informed it was almost an acre, with just under 200' (59.5m) on the lakefront.... used to be much more, actually six lots, but a couple of them are sub-aqua.  On this hot, sunny summer day, the opportunity of this permanent view across Lake Erie was an irresistible drug.

Instinctively, we debark the PT and walk straight to the breakwall, a thick steel corrugated wall, pounded down deep in the early 70s in response to the wild storms of that era, approximately twelve/fifteen feet up from the beach to the lawn.  Nowadays, a definite no-go, a big ecological denial on such protection, even reinforcing your rock breakwalls must be done with natural boulders, no cement breakwalls with their chemical make-up.  But if we didn't see that iron, there'd be no gold - we've lived on Erie before. 

Ten feet out from the wall is a free standing cement stairway - in the water, connecting to nothing, wetly waiting for a rope bridge to link it to the mainland again.  Me to Kee: "I'm thinking this breakwall went in right after the bridge seceded".  Emotionally, we're already standing on our lawn, jutting far ahead of any other cottage's property - because of this wall, and below us is a lovely sandy beach, made private because of a massive push-out bulwark in the right side of the breakwall and a rock pile on the left side of (again) our lot.  Today, shallow, easily stirred-up Lake Erie is calm and extremely clear.  We see large cement blocks from previous walls and smooth, waved sand stretching out clearly for an impressive distance.  An endless ribbon of minnows flow in the shallows.

Look to the west... cottage homes fronted by breakwalls and sandy beach curve in and out to gently point out Wheatley Harbour, then further stretch out into the lake forming the misty, treed east side of Point Pelee.  Turn east, cottages and rows of small breakwalls, stone and rusting metal, breaking the beach up as the shore heads to Holiday Harbour, then Wheatley Provincial Park, then along the cliffs heading towards Erieau and points east.

Tubby, stolid commercial fishing boats are close in and far out in the lake around us; one, picking it's nets, wears a mobile halo of gulls.  "Perch are running off Holiday Harbour", says Kee as he points my attention to the dozen pleasure boats of varying sizes not far out from that point.  We look out at the water, we look around at the old cottage, then look at each other....

Our backyard will go to Ohio. 
Now that's a selling point.
Although I do see Visitor Waivers and tethered-down grandchildren in our future.

The cottage exterior needs work.  No garage, no driveway, needs new roof, plus has a flat roof that needs to be peaked/roofed, crumbling faux Tudor details that need to be repaired or replaced, gorgeous old paned windows that are as high on the "you don't get windows like these anymore" scale as they are on the "and there's a damn good reason for it" measurement.  I immediately fixate on vertical board and batten siding and metal roof..... which, a year later, is out the proverbial leaky, picturesque window - I like the faux Tudor - it belongs, and a metal roof is too expensive and I've found scalloped shingles, cheaper and more period looking, plus good looking, period. 

There's no insulation.  And my son the millwright tells me the house's wiring was put in and signed by someone called Edison and what wiring/electricity set-up there is, is a world class non-funny joke.  And the boiler is unoperable.  And the plumbing is ancient and untrustworthy.  No air conditioning.... about the only thing I didn't care about.

The entire house is surrounded by a short inpenetrable jungle of perennials, an angry horde of "we were here first" hostas, militant legions of lily of the valley, ant-palaces of peonies and Alpes and Rockies of Snow on the Mountain.  I'll find their root systems to be as densely interwoven and pervasive as absolutely any densely interwoven, pervasive simile you can come up with.

Open the main door, the east side door into the mudroom.  Inside, the first thing you notice is the smell.  We're talking almost eighty years of two months only use.... Doing the math makes that around 2 months x 78 = 156 months open and 10 months x 78 = 780 months closed.  But right off, I found that smell exciting - to me, it was the smell of waiting adventure, change, genuineness, challenge, discovery, creativity.... with a side order of possible Black Spore Death. I think we really took possession the day we noticed people didn't come into the place, cock their heads upwards, sniff, and blither something along the lines of, well, it was closed up since Capone had his first communion.

There's actually two constructions:  1932 and 1952.  At this point in our education of the house, I do - like the inhabitants of Riseholme (E F Benson's Lucia series) - some inductive reasoning:  1932 - height of the Great Depression, therefore for Americans to build a quality second home in another land (the fishing village of Wheatley was a great haven for USers, especially Michiganers; to cottage in, from the turn of the century onwards), at such of time of economic straits, they must have been well-off.  We found all parts of the cottage buildt solidly, tongue and groove pine, proving very tight when we had it energy evaluated, with poured cement foundations (at least in the older section, bit of a bitch to follow about the newer section at a later date).

The old section had six rooms:  facing the lake, on the left/east, a kitchen with a large mudroom/entry behind it, then the living room in the middle and a master bedroom on the right/west side.  A small hall at the side of the living room held three doors:  the master bedrom, a small shower/bath and a small bedroom that faced the road front and east side of the lot.  In 1932, on  the left/east roadside wall of the living room was the front door.... a small entry, a coat closet, and across from the closet - a semi-sunk "boiler" room for the hot water boiler and the water tank.  This room is lined with cedar for some reason.... smells very nice.  In 1952, in front of the front door a big addition went up, down the east side of the new long central hall, went a large tiled bath and a large bedroom, and on the west side, an equally large bedroom and behind it, a miscellany room.  Sometime later, a lake-facing sunroom was added in front of the living room, a couple of steps lower from the french doors that originally had led straight out to the backyard.  These sunroom windows, lovely new, are all around, open up or down and add another communal living space.

In bad, bad and even worser shape - all the floors in the old side, made of 3 3/4" pine, except for the linoleum of the bathrooms, kitchen, mudroom and sunroom.  The floors in the 50s addition are of oak and of equally rough shape.  The walls are all of a rougher plaster and the walls go up to the ceiling and gently curve over to meet them.  The living room is panelled up ten feet with varying width pine, then plastered up another five feet.  Five arched pine beams were added later, by the slightly different look of them.  The unusually wide fireplace is encased in the same pine, with red brick facings and red tile hearths.  Two heatilators on each side of the fireplace helped stave of the chilblains in the fall and winter of 2009 and 2010 while renovating.  The old boiler wasn't winter-prepared, froze and cracked.  No heat.

Every wall is cracked.  The entire front bedroom lakeside wall is rotting... "I can see the lake through here" rotting.  Every ceiling is cracked.  The kitchen is orderly, neat - completely headed for a gut - but totally fine for a summer cottage.  I notice the ceiling is wallpapered - ominous, not a good sign.  And let's just say....... and so on ..... and leave it at that.

As "I'm sorry, but there is no brain activity" as it sounds, all of the above does not flatten the vision, clear the romantic "could be" fog, doesn't put the brakes on either of us.  We've done most repair and maintenance ourselves. Kee is a "can see it to do it" miracle worker.  I've always done my own painting, decorating, gardening.  We're not daunted... yet.

Because - the pine glows underneath the grime in that big central living room.  Those large windows have dozens of separate panes in them - and not many are cracked and the bedrooms have two large ones each.  The kitchen has three windows nooked out with a window seat that faces the lake.  Some of the doors are still unpainted mellow grained slabs.  The hardware is vintage.  The lot is captivating.  We are not seeing straight, especially me.

Two months after buying the cottage, the real estate agent is still getting inquiries.  If we hadn't moved with the swiftness of the unthinking, someone else would have yanked it off the pages, either doing a reno like us, or, the previous owner's dread, tearing it down for the large property and building.

We start now.

The avalanche of decision...

Kee and I are definitely not big-ticket item compulsives.  We've been in our 1970s large brick ranch for exactly 25 years.  But we were at, unknowingly, the crossroads of several turning points when the cottage came loose from it's founding American family. 

How crazy that important things happen from a random grouping of people, drinks at a friend's house, chance topics of conversation.... you're there, someone else is there.... last summer, in August, sitting at a friend's house, over a bevvie I mentioned how long I've been fascinated by the old Tudor beach cottage across from another person's house. 

And then... someone there told me about the American family who've always owned it, just using it as a summer cottage... how the elderly husband had just died the year before and the widow - a long-time friend - spoke of having difficulty with maintenance of a cottage 3 hours away, across a border, especially as now she was alone, "getting along herself", had small health concerns that were adding up and was really wanting more and more to be with her daughter and grandchildren in Seattle.  She was thinking, sadly and with regret, of selling the cottage that her husband's parents had built in 1932.

What immediately followed, I'd like to think it was a gentle mental nudge from Fate, so something that should be passed on to the right caretaker, was.  Without thinking twice, I asked the neighbour if the owner could be contacted.  She could be and was.  Kee was open to checking it out, he's always wanted to move back to the lake, where we lived when we first were married.  He too was intrigued by the old Tudor cottage.

Blur of action:  owner is contacted, she prefers real estate agent liason; we offer  well known local who's accepted; owner sets price; we view house/we counter offer; she accepts.  Summer of 2009.  We've bought the faux Tudor.

We now have two houses.  This is not the best time, in current personal and global economic history, for us to own two houses. 

Our house goes up for sale.  Six months later [insert multiple life and career trip-ups...] it sells, satisfactorily.... but in the meantime... the action-filled autumn and winter of '09 and '10.

I'm talking a long, lovely, warm September of exciting starts:  ideas to develop, research to do -  energy grant research, historic colours research, digging up the gardens...

Followed by a chilly winter of dark 5 pms, changing work clothes, then down to the cottage for endless evenings of what I call "RE", doing the rees, replastering, repainting, rewiring, rebuilding, restoring....

Then, in early spring of 2010, removing our quarter century of life from our current home, down to the lake. 

Rethinking, reinventing...

Drive By Dreaming....

Cottage stalking....

I had driven by, my husband and I had driven by, a close friend and I drove by.... by the old cottage for years... on the lake, a large, flat lot and set in the middle, a faux Tudor, single story cottage, in semi-neglectdom... no real driveway, just a long grassed berm that sometime parked cars from Michigan in the summer and always banked snow in solitude in the winter. 

Two giant willows aged with the cottage on the left driveway side, one near the house and the twin nearer the lake.  They counted off the passing decades, with a towering pine tree tight to the right side of the house, it's dense branches laying heavy to the grassless, needled ground. 

The lot was so wide and seemed so isolated that somehow the cottage seemed suspended in time and separated by space from adjacent buildings. 

And this old cottage pulled me, slowed my car down, widened my pupils... every time I drove by, made me mention it when talking about where I'd like to move next to, made me think what could be. 

And it was.