Building The Love Shack

So far as we have been building, we have been lucky, there haven’t been to many surprises.

Go back to a couple of blogs ago and I said, I was siting on the potty and got drip drip on my head. The team went up to look at the roof and see what kind of patch up job we could do.

The plan for Spring was to remove the old bathroom and add-on the new addition. The new addition would be a new bathroom and part of the new kitchen. That being said, we didn’t want to invest a lot of money or time on this repair.

We also had been told a story, that before we bought the cottage that there had been bats seen coming out of the roof, of that part of the house. So far we had not seen any bats, but then again we also had not really been there after dark.

Anyone who knows anything about roofs knows, until you open it up, you don’t know what you’ll find.

We never understood when we bought the house, why the roof had been changed and was practically new, on the main part of the house. But over the bathroom, the roof hadn’t been changed.

When we opened it up we got our answer. They never changed the old roof. They kept adding layer of plywood and shingles on top of it. Two more layers of plywood and four more layers of shingles, to be exact. The other little problem, the roof was rotted all the way through.

 

 

 

I am happy to say, there were no bats, just wasp nests, and lots of them. Then there was that other little problem.

When we looked at the roof line, the bathroom addition was dropping on the one side. This meant before the roof could be put back on, we had to jack up that side of the house.

Now the house sits of blocks. So that was not as complicated as it was going to sound, except that there really wasn’t a lot of tools up there to do this kind of work.  It had to be done the old fashion way, with two by fours and muscle. The old addition had to be lifted and the blocks had to be placed to support it. The roof line would be level again.

Once that was done, back to putting on the new roof. So the simple, lets fix the leak turned into, lift the addition and put on a new roof.

 

 

 

This now became a game changer for us. The plan in the Spring was to put in the new bathroom. Sense we have now spent all that money and time to put on the new roof, and level the addition, did I mention that because we lifted the house we had to do some adjustments to the plumbing for the toilet too? Add that, and now we practically have a new bathroom.

OK, it still looks like the old bathroom but it is now totally functions, shower and all. We have decide come Spring, we will start with the Gables on the front and back of the house first. There is no point in tearing it down in the Spring, when it can certainly last another season, and it works.

Today the Weekend Warriors are headed back to the cottage. You know those bedrooms that we had almost done before the temporary set back. They are headed back to put the trim in the bedrooms. Our goal for this year is still to have the bedrooms finished, so we can stay there next year.

There is a second reason for that goal. You see, I have all the bedroom furniture for the cottage, in my family room at our house. Christmas is only eight weeks away. At this point if I don’t get the bedrooms finished, I can’t get the family, in the family room.

On the upside, the Cast Iron Stove works so well, that when they were on the roof, they could feel the heat coming out of the house.

So where at we at? We have water, heat and hydro and a fully functioning bathroom. We have a make shift kitchen with appliances and fingers crossed that the weather keeps staying good, so we can keep getting into the cottage, and we will have bedrooms soon.

I would say, it hasn’t been a bad year for the cottage. It’s hard to believe nine months has gone by since we went for that drive, to just look at areas to see where we would like to buy.

I also learned a lot this year, that’s another blog. But what I learned most this year, is when your husbands says let’s buy the old one and gut it, he actually means,  “Lets build a whole new house.”