Taking back the porch ...

Originally the front of our house was a screened in porch with an upper balcony. At some point the structure was closed in, the old exterior wall removed and the area made part of the interior space of the cottage. While it adds to the square footage and allows for year round enjoyment of the beautiful view it was an awkward addition. The area wasn't really part of the livingroom, but it also wasn't defined as it's own separate area.

For a while Mike and I considered returning the structure back to a porch. Fortunately sanity prevailed and we came up with a solution that will allow us to enjoy the view, separate the space from the livingroom and utilize the area twelve months of the year ... the indoor porch ...

Pre-move-in (ie. previous owner's layout & stuff)

In keeping with our "recycled" home theme for the crooked cottage, the windows across the top of the interior porch wall were purchased for $25 from an architectural salvage yard. Some more pieces of finish trim need to be added and the whole unit painted. In the spring the front of the house will be reframed to accommodate a full wall of narrower, side-by-side windows, similar to the look of a screened in porch. Oh, and flooring. We need new flooring. That is the last hold out patch of the nasty, dirty old carpet and it has.to.go!!

When's a door not a door?

... when it's a wall.

Up until this week our house had three doors (not counting the patio door). Besides not being very energy efficient it was confusing. On more than one occasion we had visitors knocking at the back door - which wasn't completely their fault since the "back" door was at the end of the driveway, facing the road. Our "front" door is closer to the front of the house, but on the side ...

Well there is door confusion no more. This week Mike closed in the back door. Once we build the garage this part of the house will become the end of a hallway anyways, so we aren't really losing anything, except an extra draft.

In the spring the front door will be moving around to the actual front of the house. What a crazy concept!

Pictures as promised ...

I finally got around to taking some pictures of the bathroom. While there is still a lot of work to do (and I forgot to mention new faucets & fixtures in my last post - that 80's vanilla toilet and tub have.to.go!) it is a big improvement over what we started with ...

We are going for a whimsical, cottage-chique look in here, combining the original cabinetry with the bling of the cut-glass on the drawer pulls and light fixture. When we eventually have an ensuite this will be the girls'/guest bathroom, so we want to keep it a little more fun and less formal.

a little update ...

It's been a while since we've updated with pictures. Quite honestly nothing very exciting has been going on. There's a lot of activity under the house, but it's not the type of stuff you are anxious to share with your friends and neighbours.

Mike has been insulating the foundation and shoring up floor joists. All fantastic things for the integrity of our home, but not very glamourous. He's also been tackling the rot that he found in the sill plates. Old rotten wood has been cut out and replaced with fresh, new pressure treated framing.

Probably the most exciting picture that we have right now is of our beautiful new foundation wall. Remember this mess?

This is how it looks now ... so beautiful and clean and, well, there. We still marvel at the thought that that much of our foundation was missing. You will also notice that the mess of plumbing has been cleaned up. Now we just have one drain leaving the house instead of several running on the exterior.

In the mean time, while Mike works under the house I've been doing a bit of work in the house. My bathroom update is almost complete. The cabinetry and trim has been painted white. The walls are a pretty shade of light aqua-blue and there is new hardware and a pretty light fixture. The only thing left is window blinds. The big ticket items (flooring, tub, counter & sink) will probably not be done for a couple of years. We would like to have another bathroom with at least a shower before tearing this one apart. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures yet. Hopefully I'll get around to it in the next week or so.

In the mean time we will share these ...

Moon setting over the lake (at about 7:30 am).

Daddy's little helper.

Winter briefly arrives in our cove.

Tackling the living room structure

This is Mike posting.

Now that the crawlspace is dug out to 24-28 inches, it is actually a pleasure to work down there. The encapsulation is scheduled for the 22nd of November, so I don't have much time to finish the structural work before they come back. My main focus right now is stiffening and levelling the living room floor. The floor joists are older 2x6s (actually 2 in by 5 3/4 in), 24 in on center, and in one area spanning almost 11 feet ...... too small by today's standards. My intent is to cut this span in half, literally, by cutting a gap in the joists wide enough to accept a girder made up from 3 - 2x8s laminated together. One one end the girder will be attached to a new column installed by the crawspace contractor, and at the other end it will rest on top of the steel i-beam that runs roughly down the middle, front to back, of the original cottage.

I spent a number of hours on Friday screwing down the plank subflooring to the floor joists to help matters for that short period of time when the joists are cut. I got as far as I can get towards the fireplace. Now the L-shaped base cabinets flanking the fireplace are in the way. They need to come out, or at least the 300+ lb aquarium needs to be relocated to take as much load off the floor as possible. Tracey told me the other day that she has no attachment to them. The frames were built out of construction lumber and they were covered with tongue and groove boards. The best part?......... They were built on top of carpet! The level of laziness and short cuts taken in this place never ceases to amaze me.

Anyways, removing them will make the living room feel larger, allow me to properly stiffen and level the entire living room floor, and what's more I think we've solved where to put the tree at Christmas .

Saturday I picked up the material to build the girder, and finished the rebuild of the sill plate and rim joint at the front of the house..... all built out of pressure treated wood this time. I'll reinstall the siding when the windows and door at the front of the house are replaced or when I decide that the weather has degraded to the point where the windows and doors will have to be installed next year.

Today being my 45th birthday, I took it easy....... installed new drawer pulls on the upstairs bathroom cabinet following Tracey's painting job, and moved the aquarium off of one of living room base cabinets scheduled for removal up to Ran and Maia's bedroom. That took hours; emptying most of the water to allow Tracey and I to carry it upstairs, refilling and reconnecting everything. Finally done. By the way I solved the mystery of what happened to the missing goldfish. Gabriella wasn't eaten by her tank mates. She managed to find her way into the skull at the bottom of the tank, and passed away there. She's in the Kincardine Sewage Treatment Plant now.

I'm tired. I need to go back to work for a rest. Tomorrow it's back to work for a week of days. No lottery win yet.

remember I mentioned something about a hole ...

This is what the work crew discovered as they excavated our crawl space.

This is the side of our house now.

The mason has poured the footing for the new foundation wall, but the work has been delayed. A plumber had to come in to move a crazy tangled mess of pipes. And for some odd reason all of the drain lines run on the outside of the house (though nothing surprises us anymore). The plumber will be moving some of them in the morning.

And before you worry about the safety of our kids and pets there is a temporary beam that is jacked up and supporting the house until the new foundation blocks can be installed. We can sleep easy tonight ... except of course for the worry that some wildlife might find the gaping hole in the side of our foundation an irresistible invitation to come on in and make themselves at home (I'm thinking the plumber wouldn't be appreciative of a skunk shower first thing in the morning).

The Big Dig ...

I knew it had been a while since I posted. I just didn't realize it had been a month! It's probably because there hasn't been a lot going on.

We had a crew here a few weeks ago, but then they got called to another job and work came to a screeching halt. However, I am happy to say the boys are back and they brought friends and things are now humming along nicely.

So what's up? Well, for the last two days we have had five brave souls (six yesterday) worming around under our house in the crawl space. I should clarify I am using the term loosely. I'm not sure if it can really be defined as a crawl space if you can't actually crawl around.

As mentioned previously the crooked cottage sits on a block foundation with a dirt floor underneath. Unfortunately whoever did the foundation decided just to back fill it with whatever they had excavated in the first place. Very lazy. Not very smart. This made it almost impossible for anyone to get under the building to do any repair work (which is very necessary).

Enter our boys. Or rather I should say Advanced Basement System's boys. So far they have been great. They have been digging out our crawl space literally bucket by bucket in order to create a workable area. They have been building forms and pouring foundations and later in the week will be installing jack posts to lift back up those areas of our house that are lacking in support.

Perhaps most importantly they are preparing a footing so a mason can come and install a six foot length of the foundation wall that appears to be missing. That's right, when they starting their dig a few weeks ago they discovered that there is actually an appreciable length of foundation that just doesn't exist. Coincidentally this is in the area of the cottage with the biggest sag.

Needless to say this is very exciting. By the end of the week our cottage will not only be structurally sound, but with the floors and walls being made less crooked we can start all the fun, aesthetic parts of the reno like new windows, new floors ...

While digging the crew also found a few other things of interest, though not quite as disturbing as the lack of foundation (unless you're like my sister and insist that there is a body under here somewhere to go with the shoes ...)

What lies beneath ...

That's four shoes, one teeny tiny doll shoe, three pieces of pottery (all from the same, very old tea cup) and a bottle.

Amongst the TONS of beach rock (which we are reclaiming for landscaping) there have also been some funky fossils. This rock, though hard to tell in the picture, looks like it might be the remains of some birds. There are what appear to be dozens of small bones and a skull (in the upper right corner).

The day the trees died ...

One of the things that gives our house a nice cottagy feel is the multitudes of trees that surround it. They stretch across the front of our lot, with a clearing to facilitate the view, and then run down either side of the property. That is they did until a week ago. That's when the tree surgeon arrived with his trusty assistant. They spent the day thinning and trimming and exterminating, er, eradicating a number of our trees.

I agreed with Mike that the frontage needed some thinning. It was being taken over with choke cherry seedlings and overgrown branches from a number of cedars. Where we disagreed was over the removal of a stand of cedars on the south side of the cottage. I liked them. Mike insisted they were hampering proper drainage along that part of the property (over the years the roots had pushed up through the sandy soil and created a big mound). Needless to say I lost the argument and the clump of cedars came out. I will admit, however, that the light that pours in through the south-facing windows is quite lovely and we now have a wonderful view of the north pier and the point beyond from our upstairs hall and bathroom.

Before ...

After ...

Marked for death

The void ...

The view!

Bathroom mashup ...

What do you get when you mix classic cottage with 1980's tacky and then throw in some Star Trek? Our bathroom! This is one of the rooms in the house with fantastic potential, but at the moment is suffering from a terrible identity crisis.

This, we l-o-v-e about our bathroom. Classic cottage kitsch. There is tons of storage and awesome little shelves built into the frame around the mirror. A nice touch is that the shelves are slightly hidden, so items can be stored or displayed, but aren't in full view.

This, on the other hand, we don't love so much. It's the 1970's disco gold-fleck counter top. It, I'm afraid, is on the endangered species list. It does get a temporary reprieve however because the "big" bathroom renovation stuff is not high on our priority list.

These, however, are not so lucky. We absolutely can not stand the 1980's faux bronze antique fixtures that adorn our bathroom. And unfortunately for us someone in the past had managed to find the COMPLETE matching bathroom fixture suite, I mean everything from toilet roll holder to towel bar, to cabinet hinges, to door knob ... I could go on, and on. As I mentioned, the bathroom was a longer term project on our renovation roster, but largely due to these babies I am giving the bathroom a little makeover to tide us over until we can do the serious work.

The walls and vanity will be painted and new hardware installed. Mike has already taken down the triple sliding glass doors on the tub. While very functional, they looked somewhat dated and the fact that the girls almost pulled them off the track on more than one occasion quickly slotted them for removal. I will probably also find a new light fixture. While this futurama Star Trek number is not ugly, it's not really in keeping with the cottage feel that we are going for.

In the long term, the bathroom will see a new ceramic or marble tile floor, the tub insert will be removed and replaced with a free-standing, claw-foot tub and the linen closet will probably be taken out in order to open the space up more. I don't expect to see any of that work to happen in the next year though.

While the cat's away the mice will ...

install light fixtures? Yep. While I was visiting some family with the girls Mike was busy at home getting some pest-free, um, I mean uninterrupted work done. He ticked a lot of small jobs off of his list, but for me the most exciting one was light fixtures in the kitchen/dining area.

He also started digging a trench around our foundation. Remember I said we hadn't had any nasty surprises yet except for the lovely red shag? Well, I spoke too soon. The brainiac who re-sided the house last time actually put the lowest run of siding below grade, as in buried under the dirt. This is another of those "who does that?!!"s. Mike was aware of this when we bought the cottage and had always planned on digging out around the foundation wall, pulling off the lower pieces of siding and properly finishing the foundation with insulation and parging up to an appropriate height. Unfortunately when he was digging his trench in the front yard he discovered this:

That would be rot in the sill-plate, the piece of wood at the bottom of the exterior support walls that sits on the foundation. It's not a catastrophic find by any means, but it will be a tedious job to chisel out the rotten areas and replace them with new wood. Thank you idiot installer who did the siding improperly.

Bargain bonanza!

Mike and I scoped out some light fixtures for our kitchen at a local home building store. While we aren't quite ready to do any major work on the kitchen they were on sale for 20% off so we thought we would grab them. We are trying to do our renos on a budget - not el cheapo, but trying not to break the bank either. The store only had two of the three fixtures me needed in stock and had to ship one in from another location. When I picked them up today the clerk apologized and said that she could only give me the fixture from the other store for the price that the other retailer had it listed - $74. OK, no big deal. But then she says, "but you got the full clearance price on the two from our store." They were $75% off! Cha-ching! So we got three light fixtures for our kitchen - two pendants and a larger main fixture - for a whopping $169! (HST included!)

Oh, and here's what they look like ...

We thought they had a bit of a retro-cottagey look. We do plan on toning down the chrome finish though.

The two pendants will go over my new counter island/bar section. Well, it's not totally new. It is an existing bank of cabinetry, but it previously had uppers over it (this picture was taken before we took possession).

The day the ceilings came down so did the upper cabinets. It made a huge difference. The kitchen now has a much more open feel to it and the counter space is so much easier to work with. The counter top will be widened to better accommodate stools on the far side and the old cabinets will be re-purposed and used in our future mudroom.

Shagadelic baby ...

You know how in my last post I said that nothing unexpected had reared its ugly head yet? That wasn't completely true. Something frightening from the 70's was discovered lurking under our floor. Red. Shag. Carpet. 'Nuff said. What makes this discovery even more shocking is the fact that when two of the support posts and our fireplace hearth were installed they were put right on top of the carpet! Who does that?! Really. I couldn't imagine that it would be all that difficult to find a utility knife and cut out the material on top of the subfloor when you're about to install permanent structural stuff.


Our crooked cottage also has another throwback to the swingin' 70's. The hot tub room. Well, what was the hot tub room. Our familyroom is completely lined, walls and ceiling with cedar planking. It smells like a large sauna. Our real estate agent told us that the room in decades gone by also sported a hot tub. This place must have been party central ... hot tub, fireplace, door that locks from the inside ... all that's missing is the disco ball, but we're sure we'll find it here somewhere.

Cool finds ...

When you start taking an old house apart you expect to find a few nasty little surprises. *So far* we've been lucky and nothing unexpected has reared its ugly head. But we have found some cool little surprises. Here's my top 5 funky finds in the Crooked Cottage ...

1. Super Sweet Sconces!

We have a pair of these babies flanking the fireplace. While the bases are somewhat hideous I love the pressed glass shades. We will be rehabbing these little gems with new bases and wiring, and they will then return to the fireplace once we have our new mantle built.

2. The Shell Shade:

This is the light in our kitchen. When we first saw it we thought oh, gawd, that is really tacky. Who would put up that cheesy plastic, faux-tiffany thing?! Then we looked a little closer. The shade on the fixture is actually made of thin sections of shell! What is more suiting to a beach house than that? So, this too will be revitalized. We will replace the kitchen light, clean up the shell shade and give it a new life as a pendant fixture in a reading corner.

3. The Master Door

This is the door to the master bedroom. It is made of tongue and groove pine planks. The latch is similar to one you would put on a gate. It's cute. Not super private though ... it's only about 3/4 of an inch thick.

4. Reclaimed Shelves

We have discovered these shelves all through the cottage. It would appear that at one time all of the doors were like our master bedroom. It would also appear that at some point someone decided to chop them all up and use them for shelves in all of the closets (you can still see where the hinges were on many of them). Recycling at its finest, but what a shame to ruin all of those charming doors!

5. The Breathtaking View!

OK, so this was no surprise. In fact it's the main reason we bought the place. But I just had to share. The first one was taken from our front yard and the second from the rocks about 100' from our property. Whenever the going gets rough we will use this to remind ourselves why it's all worth it. We are so very fortunate.

So here we are. After only two years in a brand new house we have packed up the kids and moved to an old house by the beach. Are we crazy? Probably. But life is an adventure and we are up for the challenge. This will be the journal of our journey in restoring this diamond in the rough.

The picture in the blog header was the original cottage. We were told that in the 1970's it was jacked up, a foundation put underneath and an addition built on the back. The cottage was then used as a year round family home from that point on. This is what our home currently looks like.

Why the "Crooked Cottage"? Because it is! Due to some questionable structural work our house sags slightly in the middle. There is also a hump in the livingroom floor because of a poorly supported post that has dropped. The first order of business is getting crawl space specialists to jack up the support beams under the cottage.

Well, that's actually the second order of business. The first was tearing out some retro ugly that had to go. We're talking wall-to-wall ceiling tiles. Before we even had a box in the door Mike had the livingroom ceiling torn down. The kitchen was next. The carpets also found their way out the door relatively quickly.

It certainly has been a chaotic move-in!