Expanded Guest Services

As mentioned earlier, we had a few guests over the May long weekend.

Since the start of the season, we've had one in particular show up several weekends.  First, he made his way down the stairs from the across-the-street neighbour's property and onto our parking pad.

Then a couple of weekends later, he found himself deeply interested in the bird feeder.

You have to be pleased when a guest enjoys the food you offer.

And he was back again this past weekend, doing much the same thing.

Oddly enough, I first spotted him across the street again, by the parking pad. But when I saw him a few minutes later, he was trotting from where the shed used to be (damn shed...) and made his way to the feeder. I suspect he was there a good part of the night. Christine has named him "Bandit".

But two-legged guest are getting some attention too. We've made a few changes in the guest room too, including some new bedding and curtains...

...we removed the generic white wire shelves and replaced them with yet more previously-useless wood that was stored under the cottage. The brackets are new, of course.

And over the dresser we've added a picture that Caroline took some time ago.

And no, it isn't crooked. Follow the wall lines. Standard disclaimer time: NOTHING is straight in this place.  Unless it's supposed to be crooked or bent, in which case it's probably as straight as a railroad spike.

Here's a closer look. Apologies for the reflection.

Caroline: If there was a special technique or filter used for getting that colour, fill me in and I'll edit it in. I might just do a straight copy-and-paste job in case I can't properly explain your techno mumbo-jumbo, so don't call me names 'cause mum and dad will know.

Hey, you see the three drawers on that dresser? They're routinely empty. Those of you who come a bit more often, or who can and might, claim one.  Make it your "change of plans" drawer. Keep pajamas in there, a toothbrush, whatever.  Just in case you're only planning on dropping by for the afternoon but you're not feeling the drive back. It can happen.

One condition: It has to be emptied by the end of the year. You don't want some critter to make a condo of your underwear for six months.

Spring! Time To Rotate The Furniture!

We had some company this past weekend. Christine's mum and Nanny came by on Saturday and spent the night. Rob and Deb joined us that afternoon, then Kathy showed up early on Sunday for the day.

Beautiful mini-vacation. Chris and I arrived on Thursday evening because we took Friday off to make a four-day weekend. The entire "holiday" was sunny and warm. A lot of our time with guests was spent at the kitchen deck, chatting and munching.

The dining room and hallway renovations aren't quite completed yet but discussion about the work done to this point made me notice how many things have been improved simply by moving items around. The paddle on the wall above the wine rack and the boat picture above the couch in the dining were both wasting away in the bunkie, for example.

With that in mind, more recently...

The above was the proverbial first domino to drop. Just a Wal-Mart purchase. It replaced a dresser that was shorter, but wider. However, because of that width, it was a bit in the way when entering the master bedroom. So not only does this guy look significantly better, he helped create better access.

Plus he's heavy as hell. Christine likes to have me carry heavy things.

The dresser that was replaced went into the bunkie.

There he is, holding up Fred The Frantic Garden Frog. He was a bit in the way in the master bedroom, but for a structure that will become a shed, a dresser with several drawers of varying sizes makes a lot of sense. Nice fit.

While I was down there, I noticed a small table that I also wanted to repurpose. It's supporting another frog now.

Just a little fold out deal that they had tucked away for guests to use while spending nights in the bunkie. Therefore, it no longer served a purpose. Now it does. In addition to displaying Fern, I also rest my Captain Canuck coaster there when I sit in the Captain's Chair.

The table we used previously is now next to the new dresser (at right on the first picture).  And the coffee table that we were using in the living room now appears in the bunkie picture.

And why is that, you ask? Because we made this guy:

This was another table that sat in the bunkie, gathering up clutter. We popped of the top, trimmed a few pieces of wood that were laying around under the house and screwed those in place. It looked pretty nice at first, but one of the boards is starting to warp so it still needs a little love. We'll work on it.

To cap things off, we replaced the cushions on the chairs in the living room.

Doesn't Fern look happy? He's positively glowing! :-)

Nothing fancy there, those were picked up in a Loblaw's. The previous ones were stained and worn so they're now in forced retirement.

So a bunch of small changes executed while making the big ones. The big ones are almost done and I can't wait to share those too.

Shed Wars 2: The Sheddening

Shed Wars did not end when Christine and I pushed against the back of that monstrosity last year and caused it to collapse. Oh no. That was just part one.

We are now converting the bunkie into a shed / boat house. The notion of having a little mini-house in which people can sleep is nice, but impractical. We have a guest bedroom, the Sun Room and even a sofa bed in the living room where people can sleep and each is significantly closer to the bathroom and, perhaps more importantly, the Keurig.

Also, at some point we had a critter infestation in the bunkie. There was a staggering amount of mouse poops throughout the little building. It reached a point where I've given up on having chocolate sprinkles on ice cream going forward. We couldn't possibly ask someone to spend a night in there any longer.

So here's a touch of what I was facing.

This is after taking out the fire bowl and the lawn chairs. The place was crazy cluttered.

The priority was getting rid of the mattress and box spring in the back. We have a work bench in the garage that we want to bring down and place in that spot. Christine rented a U-Haul van on Monday and not only did we manage to get that done, but we tossed out parts of the original shed that were still laying around.

The carpet has been pulled up and...it isn't so bad under there. The plywood floor is solid, aside from one rotted corner, and there's a patch of mould to deal with. Frankly, we expected far worse.

That was a lot of work, even though I had a bit of help...

Know why George was so interested? When I moved the mattress out, a mouse popped out of the middle and scared the hell out of me. So of course I screamed like a little girl. I had no idea there might still have been a beast in there.

But George knew! He was all over it.  And that's the cushion to one of the lawn chairs above. When he got a hold of that, he was on a mission.

So that done, I hit the "off duty" switch.  Bugsy helped there too.

Settle down, Ladybug!
Good girl. 

After our visit to the dump (Gary was there!), returning the U-Haul and determined to take it easy from there on in, Christine made a pot of that Canadian Tundra stuff I posted earlier. Damn, that stuff is good...

We spent a nice, relaxing afternoon and evening. Which was good, because we woke up to this:

Huh...what?

We were there from Saturday to Tuesday. The temperature would drop to slightly below zero overnight and reach about 10 during the day. Christine had heard that snow was possible, but two inches was a bit unexpected nonetheless.

I loved it. I've long wanted to spend a relatively warm winter day at the cottage but we always held off because normally the water hose would be pulled.

Well, I got one. In April, granted, but I got one. A morning, anyway. By the time we left in mid-afternoon, most of it was gone.

More Floor Futures

I still don't want to show anyone what's going on in the dining room and the hallway but I can say that it's well underway.

My dad and I planned on heading out there last Saturday to work on a number of things. There was no way we would be bored, there are plenty of projects, big and small, to attack. Asley made a surprise guest-appearance and provided another extremely helpful pair of hands.

Once we got going, there was no stopping our little runaway freight train. We worked for five or six hours straight. Well...I did take the occasional break to text Christine about how friggin' awesome the whole thing looked.

We made sure the floor was level. Or as level as we were ever going to get it, anyway. We're not exactly working with a quality canvas here. If the walls are crooked, the floors are too, right?

But despite that little road block we got about 80% of the dining room done. Dad and I are heading back out there tomorrow to wrap it up. In theory. I shall report back.

At some point, feeling I wasn't contributing much (it doesn't take three people to tap in uncut boards of vinyl flooring) I wandered off to finish the stairs.

Man, look at that...Why in the hell would you ever tile that over? It's unlikely that we will. We'll give them a good sanding and proper framing but this is a case of less is more.

Here's another look at the post "demolition" result.

Maybe a stain or something...We'll figure it out.

Of course, now we're falling into the trap of "The floor will look great in the hallway!" leading to "The stairs will look like crap."  Then when the stairs look great, the floor around the fireplace in the living room will look like a turd in a punch bowl. And so on and so forth.

So while I don't like to overstate things, I must admit that we're at the point where the mere sight of that living room floor tile feels like a violation of our souls.

Thankfully we believe we've landed on its replacement.  If you can find the time, rotate your eyes about five degrees to your right.

See that colour scheme? That's going to be the floor down there, we think. It should blend nicely with the other half of the room.

Not sure yet of the timing on this one. I mean, I would LOVE for it to be done for when Christine's mum next visits but I'm not sure about scheduling, resources (including manpower), etc.

We do have a few days off at the end of April....

"If It Weren't For The Last Minute..."

As anticipated in the previous post, I spent another night in Crow Lake on March 12th.

We didn't plan to tour every Home Hardware, Lowe's and Rona in the region so we brought the wiener tots for a run 'n' sniff around the property. Since the worst of the cold weather appears to have passed, we put some of the furniture that is normally stored inside during the winter back outside (such as the BBQ and the patio table) to create a little more room in which to work.

And we got much further along in clean-up work than I expected. Christine hauled back a lot of the old tiles to toss into the dumpster at her work.

So that done and with Christine on her way, I made sure to protect the loved ones that kept me company and got to work again.

It went great! All but a small strip of flooring is removed in the entire dining room and hallway. Quarter-round has been popped off but most of it is set aside for possible re-use.

Christine suggested that I not be shy about tearing up the tiles on the stairs down to the living room. I did the top one to see what's under there. Not wild about how the top of the staircase and the hallway are connected but I believe we can improve on that and make it look good too.

Of course, I have no attention span so while taking a breather on the living room deck, I spotted a beast of some sort on the lake.

From my distance, I wasn't sure at first that it even was an animal. I thought it might just be a rock. Until it hit me; How in the hell did a rock get to the middle of the lake?

Then it disappeared briefly and returned. I googled it, and it turns out that rocks don't swim. So it was probably a beaver because groundhogs prefer, you know...ground. That's why they call them that.

My Canadian Geographic moment done with, I made my little mess-free pizza supper, burned the roof of my mouth with it, started a fire and settled down for the night.

To start my chill session, a co-worker lent me the movie Woodlawn.

I'll tell you what, I'm not the most religious guy in the world but...I liked this quite a bit. It takes place in a segregated high school in 1973. Being exposed to religion brings the football team together and their fortunes turn around almost immediately.

Coincidentally, one of the players on the rival team ended up playing for the Redskins in the early 90's, and he had a particularly memorable game for them. So that was an added treat for me. It's a little preachy, sure, but apparently factual so it's hard to argue against it.

Now then...Instead of sleeping on the 2-seat couch this time, I used the futon in the Sun Room. A better choice overall. Furn The Furnace worked all night to keep me warm but there was still a bit of a chill when I woke up. I whipped up some hot apple cider, tidied up a bit and went for a walk into "town".

Christine showed up around 9, I believe, and after a bit of cleaning up from the previous evening's work, we went to The Maples for breakfast. The asparagus/Swiss cheese omelette is now my morning regular there.

So now we start creating instead of...huh...de-creating. The plan is for my dad and I to head up there next Saturday and start laying down some foam padding on top of the plywood in preparation for applying the vinyl flooring.

Now as I understand it, Christine's mum may be in town around May long-weekend.

That's good. I can use that as a deadline. Because unless you have one, it's too easy to keep pushing stuff back (Chris, remind me to e-mail about the cracked window in the office).

Presumably at least some portion of her time will be spent at CFB Crow Lake as she goes between Ottawa and Kingston (John A. MacDonald is buried in Kingston, you know...). So our "crib away from da 'hood" can be nothing less than spectacular by then! No mother-in-law of mine is spending time in no dump!

We are on the clock! Before, I just wanted it done ASAP so I could get into lazy-mode (my default setting, truth be told) by June. But now we have an actual purpose. It's pretty great!

No pictures of that area in the meantime. :-)

Itch Partially Scratched.

Well, I did it.

I finally got to spend a winter night at the cottage.

There was a method to the madness. Or at least a reason. Christine spotted a wicked good deal on vinyl flooring at Lowe's recently. 17 boxes later, we'd decided the living room floor and hallway were going to get beautified (and perhaps the bathroom. And/or the area around the stove. Maybe the kitchen. It's all open to debate).

But it has to get worse before it gets better. So on February 20th, I started tearing stuff up.

The original thinking was that Christine and I would drop stuff off, she would head home to look after the wiener tots, and I would spend the night. Then my dad would meet me, or my rapidly-cooling corpse, the following morning.

There were some concerns but none of them caused any grief.

No water, no problem! Brought up a jug.

Was able to keep the place warm just fine between the wood stove, the baseboard heaters and Furn the furnace.

Brought up the ingredients to make a (fake, of course) pepperoni pizza.

Listened to some Waterboys and chopped away at my floor. Later, a bottle of port provided fire in the belly.

I had a great sleep on the couch in the living room. Made a hot chocolate when I woke up, drank some of it outside after it started snowing slightly, then got to work again for a while. By that point, I was pretty far along.

The good news is that the plywood looks great so far. It doesn't appear as though any of the original floor will need to be replaced.

Of course, this kind of project is rarely without a surprise or two. We found out that this was the second set of tiles that had been put down. And to even the floor out, some kind of leveling mortar was applied in some areas between those sets. Fantastic.

But it's all good! Now I know that I can spend a night out there in mid-winter so long as the temperature doesn't dip too low. I'm planning on doing so again March 12th to push this little reno along even further. The rest of the tiles need to come up and the quarter-round needs to be removed. Then we're good to go with sub-floor, foam padding and our own vinyl flooring. I really want it done before we start to go regularly. Doesn't seem like it'll be a problem.

As for the floor itself, it'll look a little something like this.

"Driftwood Oak" by Stainmaster.

This is a big one. When we're done with the floors, we have a few other fixes and improvements we want to complete in the dining room and hallway and if everything goes according to plan, it's going to look gorgeous. I can't wait to flip from demolition to construction.

Canadian Tundra!

A blog is good for reminders of past events but also for future ones.

Christine came across the following recipe in the LCBO Food and Drink magazine. I understand that this publication can be a bit challenging to find at times so for those who may have missed it (or will) and for our own future reference on a chilly, rainy, spring day at the cottage, here is...The Canadian Tundra!

To a slow cooker or large pot, add 2 cups (500 mL) Canadian whisky, 1 cup (250 mL) fresh or frozen cranberries, ½ to ¾ cup (125 to 175 mL) maple syrup (to taste), 2 cups (500 mL) cranberry juice and 3 cups (750 mL) fresh (cloudy) apple juice. 

Add 1 orange sliced in wheels, 1 lemon sliced in wheels and 3 cinnamon sticks. 

Heat, but do not allow to boil, allowing the liquid to warm for at least 15 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

Spoon into cups and garnish each with a cinnamon stick.

It is said to make nine servings. But that doesn't mean it has to serve nine. There's a difference. ;-)

For some time now I'd thought of adding a page specific to some of our more common and successful meals at the cottage. Thing is, unless you're prompted to go, you're unlikely to think to check the page. Or you'll check it for a while and if nothing is added to it for months, you'll get out of the habit or assume it's never updated.

So I'll go a different route. For those unfamiliar with blogs, posts can be labelled for quick subject reference. This one is the first to have the "recipe" label attached to it.

So if you ever needed to find this post to make this no-doubt delicious drink, you can click on "recipes" in the right column as opposed to scrolling back through all my nonsense or trying to remember that it was posted in January 2016. That's one relatively easy way, anyway.

If anyone ends up making it at some point, share some reviews and/or adjustment suggestions please.