May Long

We were so lucky to have a bunch of friends and family come to the cottage to help us fill a second dumpster this weekend.  Many hands make light work!

Here are our supplies for the weekend... we must keep our helpers well fed and watered!

We demolished the interiors of the rest of the rooms that will be removed, and this marks the end of the insulation.  We are so happy not to have to deal with the itchy fibreglass anymore!

All the walls are stripped of drywall, wood paneling and electrical...

 ...then we moved onto the last of the ceiling to be removed.

Dad removing some electrical.

We even got help planting a couple new trees.  This one is a 6 in 1 apple tree with all my favourite varieties!

End of day one and the dumpster is almost full already.  Good work team!

A little bon fire to celebrate the end of a good day.

Rainy Day

It was a rainy day at the cottage... but the lake was peaceful.

With rain outside, I decided to tackle to bathtub, that was stained with layers of iron and soap scum.  Amazingly, it came clean!  Some new caulking, and it will be good to go.  Nothing fancy, but exciting to us to be able to shower after a long day working, covered with fibreglass and drywall dust.

Chris found some more treasure as he dismantled room #5.

Hubby looks like an old man, napping on his porch.  Should I buy him a banjo or a knife for whittlin'?  :)

The old well cover was disintegrating, dropping wood and debris into the dug well everytime we moved it.  I decided to take a dismantled door frame to create a new well cover to keep it a bit cleaner until we have a proper one constructed.

First Dip

My hubby is a little crazy, and a very eager to get into the lake.  He went swimming on May 6th!  That's gotta be a record.

Apparently we're in tick country!  I had never seen one before, but I'm getting very familiar with them now.  They are persistent little buggers, and we find them everywhere.  Luckily they are wood ticks, and do not carry lyme disease... so they are more of a nuisance than a real danger.  They are also seasonal and die off once it gets warmer.

Another photo of the pretty daffodils.  So far the only flowers to appear.

Our neighbour continues preparations to put his land on the market.  He is filling in the path on both sides of the bridge so 4 wheelers can pass over safely.  We considered buying the property to ensure our future privacy, but even his rock-bottom neighbourly rate is out of our price range.  We'll have to keep our fingers crossed that our future neighbours are respectful of our privacy, but we'll likely plant a row of trees along the creek just in case.

Four Rooms

This is the third room, in the process of being demolished. We plan to fill this room with debris - it will be our storage area until we get another dumpster to take it away.

This pretty much sums up my day:

 After the drywall is down, we go around and clean up the walls of all nails and screws, in the hopes we might be able to reuse this wood in the future.

 An example of the lovely  layers of wallpaper:

This is back in the first section we demolished - we're removing the closet walls.  This is where the floor has sunk, so I'm actually swinging on this part of the wall:

By the end of the day we had the ceiling removed in room #3, and our pile is growing nicely.

And here is room number four, all walls and closet removed.

Only two more rooms to demo from the inside, then we'll move on to the exterior.  But first we have a few structural details to work out.

Thank Goodness for Plumbers

This is our first experience with a well, pump, and pressure tank.  We brought in a plumber to prime the pump, and explain how it all works.  He also did some much needed repairs.  The pipes had frozen over the winter, and there were many leaks that needed to be fixed.

I had considered attempting the repairs myself, but I hate going into the crawl space.  It's muddy, it smells bad, and there are spiders.   It's also a tad scary to be reminded of the sketchy structure under the house; aside from the cracked beams, 2x4 joists spaces two feet apart, and rot everywhere, I also realized we're relying on what amount to little inukshuks to hold up the floor.

When I saw what the plumber had to do to reach the kitchen pipes, I knew I had made the right decision.  Worth every penny!

Even the hatch to enter the crawl space is creepy!

Five hours later, all the leaks are fixed, and here is our lovely tap water!  I guess a winter of sitting unused has left a fair amount of rust in the pressure tank.  We'll flush it out next time, and it will be good to go.

Rubber Boots

We bought some rubber boots so we could get a little deeper into the lake.  The quality of the lake is very important to us, since that's the main focus of this land.  We like to swim and boat, so we've been very excited to explore the shore... and can't wait to get a canoe down here so we can explore beyond our cove.

 Beautful lake bottom.

The buds are coming out.

The neighbour has been cutting trees and repairing the bridge.  The land beside ours will be for sale soon, and we're quite concerned about having neighbours so close.  The only feasible building site will be on a hill overlooking our property - far from ideal for us.

Spring is here!

Snow is gone!  Lake is thawed!  Daffodils are blooming!  It's nice to finally see the land in springtime.

It was windy today on the lake.  The bay faces north, so we expect some strong winds funneling down the cove.

We finally got a look at the shoreline... not too bad!  Little pebbles and not too much seaweed.  (Lakeweed?)  I'm eager to get in with my snorkel and mask and see what the bottom is like.

We sorted our comic book treasure.  Nothing of great value, but still fun to go through.

We continued to demolish the back portion of the house.  Parts of the structure are completely rotten - the wood disintegrates if you touch it.

We removed all of the electrical, salvaging most of the wire and boxes.

The plumber is coming next week to teach me how to prime the pump.  Until then, we get water from the well the old fashioned way.

I never thought I'd say this, but we had a book bonfire.  We salvaged what we could, but many of the books were too damp, musty or moldy to be saved.

The kids books were especially difficult to burn, but the consensus was no one wanted to give their kids books that were covered in insulation fibres and mouse poop.