Building A Cottage
Hello, my name is Tim. I’m 32 and live about 35 minutes outside of Toronto, Ontario Canada. For anyone reading this outside of Ontario, owning a cottage is a very common thing here. It’s to the point where there are almost no more decent waterfront lots available within 3.5 hrs of Toronto. Trying to head north on the weekends in the summer is madness. The highways are packed with SUV’s and trucks towing their boats behind them. The stress level on the highway is through the roof as everyone is trying to get to their cottages as quickly as they can knowing full well that in about 32hrs they will have to do the same thing all over again heading south to get back home.
This migration happens every weekend in the summer and as much as us folks that don’t have a cottage laugh at the stupidity of the whole situation, we are secretly envious of all these cottage owners. To have a cottage means relaxing, playing, eating and drinking. It means getting together with friends and family. It means campfires and roasting marshmallows. It means everything that I would love to do and I would be more then willing to sacrifice a few hours in traffic each week to have my own cottage.
I set a goal when I got out of university that I would own a cottage by the time I was 35 years old. I found a girlfriend that shared my enthusiasm for camping and cottaging so I married her! And so together we started to look for a cottage we could afford. Quickly we found that we couldn’t afford to pay for a house and a cottage so we refocused and decided we would buy a vacant waterfront lot and build a cottage on it some day.
After 3 years of searching we found a lot and we are in the stages of having building permits approved for our cottage. Over the following months I will talk about searching for a vacant lot, setting your cottage requirements, things to look for, things to avoid, how to put a bid on a lot, mortgage options, cottage building packages/plans, do-it-yourself considerations, septic systems, and alternative power supply systems.
I expect to be building some time in May or June 2007 so I will also be doing a weekly photo journal to keep everyone up to date on my progress. Hopefully this will be a lot of help to people considering buying a lot and building a cottage themselves. I’m sure there will be lots of pitfalls that I won’t see coming, but I’m excited about this and look forward to sharing it with you!
Tim
Sounds like a lot of work, but I’m sure it will be worth it. When you document your progress it could be a great resource for others who want to do the same thing.
The main reason for starting this blog was to share the cottage building process with others. So I hope it is useful as well as interesting. It will be a lot of work especially for a novice like myself, but I’m looking forward to it.
If you don’t mind a suggestion: you should consider creating a category just for your posts about the cottage (this post is filed under “general”). That way people who are interested in following your progress can see all of those posts together without having to sort through other unrelated posts.
Hi Tim,
I like your blog and content.
Your blog design is very clean and elegant. Did you design it yourself.
No. Actually a friend of mine is handling all the development work. Thanks for the compliment he’ll be glad to hear.
I am jealous my friend.
Sounds like a lot of work, but I’m sure it will be worth it. When you document your progress it could be a great resource for others who want to do the same thing.
I feel your pain. I am going to start this process next year to build on an island in Ontario. It sounds like I’ll be dealing with a lot of the same issues as you’ve had. I’m going to build exactly 1000 square feet to meet the minimum requirements. It seems like a chicken and egg thing. Do you spend the time and money to get the design & plans done only to be told to change them or do you try to find out what will be acceptable and build to that? It seems pretty hard to figure out exactly what would be accepted. Any advice on the order to do things? Are you using a contractor or building yourself?
James I would definitely say to find out what is acceptable and build to that. I wasn’t aware there was a minimum building size so I went ahead and purchased a cottage package from home hardware. I intended on building the cottage myself with the help from some friends, but I’ve come across some contractors that I trust and might be able to trade cottage time for their services. Good luck with your plans!