Remodeling a Summer Cottage: Part One

Before the remodel 

A major part of my summer was the remodeling of my parent's cabin. When I was a child my father bought a small cabin from his sister. The cabin has been in our family since it was built in 1949. My father's Uncle built it by himself. He did not install electricity or plumbing at the time of building it.  Electricity was added later, but it has still never had plumbing. It has an outhouse.  It's foundation is cement that was poured into stove pipes than the house was built around them because the land he purchased is on a hill.

As a child my father would take us to the cabin for days at a time. We had a giant lake to swim in, a patio, and lots of places to walk and explore. We would pick berries, in the spring we had cherries, in June we had black berries, in July we had Dew Berries (That's what we called them, but I think they have a different name), and in August the Gooseberries were ripe. It was fun, it was a cycle. When I was fourteen we installed a raft. The raft was a lot of fun. We would take the boat into the swamp and look at all the bull frogs, lilly pads, and flowers. It's a place that means a lot to me.


Then there are the sounds. There is loons. They make the most soothing sounds.  They are an endangered bird and there aren't a lot of them this far south in Michigan, but our lake has two of them that return every year.

The first place we started on our remodel was on the roof, we started from the top down and the roof needed to be replaced. This was not a DYI project, so we hired Sam. He is a friend of my family. After talking to him about some of our plans, it became clear we needed to hire him. He saw our vision. We discussed the importance of starting on the roof and working around the rest of the house. This is only a summer cabin, but we wanted to make it as welcoming and protected from the elements as possible.

When the day came to do the roof Randy and I decided to work on the patio. Randy and I worked on the landscaping as much as we could. We built two retention walls on the patios. One near an old pump that my Great Uncle put in when he built the place. There were still railroad ties in the side of the hill. We had to dig them out because of all the erosion, so building brick retaining walls seemed like a great idea.  We had to do the job in two parts. The first part was the top patio, which took my husband about an hour to dig it out. As he was digging I had to the move the 22.5 lb.  blocks over the small hills and valleys from the truck to the patio. I could only handle four at a time in the wheel barrow and there were 100 of them. Needless to say, my arms were angry the next day and after all the digging Randy's body wasn't real happy either. I'm sure it was good for us.

The first retaining wall took us an entire day and used about 80 bricks. We liked it so well, and we had already decided to do something with the second patio, so it was only natural that the following week we built the second retaining wall down by the pump.  I planted some plants by the patio. I wanted perennials and they had to shade plants because of all the trees. The entire area is covered in moss, the grass is patchy at best, but there are a lot of plants, it being so close to the lake. I chose Hostas, Philox, and some lilies. There are a lot of Tiger lilies all over the hill near the second retaining wall.

This was just the first part of the remodeling project. After this we decided to work on the siding and making the inside look like a log cabin. Those projects took us about a month and I will write about them in a separate blog. It's a very special place to me and has been since I was a child. It's renewal is very important to me and all the time we took to do this project was well spent and will hopefully benefit us for years to come.