Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Cottage Life

Ready, set, build This one’s for you, all you people who have emailed us over the years asking for plans from a long-forgotten issue. Well, delete that saved draft—Cottage Life Project Plans are now available for purchase online. You can find some of our most popular builds, including the outhouse, the outdoor shower, the Muskoka chair, and the bee box. Plus, we’re uploading new plans every month, so keep checking back as you gear up for next season. Visit cottagelife.com/projectplans. Add this to your watch list It’s only natural to wonder how people can survive in the coldest and most remote regions of northern Canada. Good news—you can catch up on episodes of Life Below Zero Canada, now streaming on the Apple TV+ app. Start your free trial today. The…

Speak now, or hold your peace We want to know if Zimmer crashed our wedding (“Married…With Hassles,” In Like Zim, Oct ’20). We don’t remember inviting him, but here are the similarities: we were married in November, at a reception hall, had a six-course meal, served flaming sambuca, and definitely danced the chicken dance. Uncanny!—mark and marilyn hiseler, via email This summer, the woman who used to help us run a kids’ camp at the cottage held her wedding at the lake. Sadly, not all family could attend due to COVID-19. As the groom’s family is from Newfoundland, they brought a trailer in order to social distance, and we made our kid’s cottage available for other guests. The bride’s brother is a chef, and he made a multi-course meal for…

We’ve all been there. We get back to the cottage in the winter and need to use a piece of gas-powered equipment, but it just won’t start. Properly draining and storing your machinery at the end of the season can prevent this inconvenience, but that task sometimes gets forgotten. By far the most common cause of a no-start is the gasoline itself. Modern fuels, especially those containing ethanol, start degrading and losing combustibility after as little as 30 days. If the fuel in your non-starting engine is older than that—and you didn’t add fuel stabilizer—the first thing to do is completely drain the fuel system and refill with fresh juice. To do this, first empty the old fuel from the tank into a suitable container for disposal by tipping a…

Automotive batteries don’t like the cold. A battery can lose up to 60 per cent of its cranking power at just -18°C, and it can drop even further as temps get colder. A battery that does just fine at home may have trouble starting the car after sitting through a cold weekend at the cottage. Fortunately, there is an easy and inexpensive solution: a battery blanket. Also called a battery heater, this electrically heated pad plugs into a household outlet to keep your battery warm. Installation is simple. Strap the blanket around your battery and route its power cord out the front of your vehicle. In most cases a warm, strong battery will start your car, but in extreme cold you may need a block heater as well. When you…

Q: Do you have any tricks for getting the smell of campfire smoke out of clothes and fabric without washing? In the winter, we do a lot of outdoor campfires at the cottage, and we’re finding that laundering bulky items like parkas and snow pants, etc., after every weekend isn’t convenient. —ELIZABETH RAMIREZ, VIA EMAIL A: Quick, to the Crowdsourcing Machine, we thought. Fail. We asked your question on Instagram and were met with confusion, disbelief, and, in a few cases, white-hot blinding rage. (“Remove the campfire smell? I don’t understand;” “Why would you ever want to get rid of that smell?” “WTF Cottage Life? City much!?!”) Okay, so, 99 per cent of the Insta-verse wants to smell like campfire smoke for all of eternity. You, however, do not. That’s…

1 Samantha Bigley, an OPP constable in Bracebridge, Ont., on what constitutes distracted driving “Distracted driving relates to handheld devices in the vehicle. There’s no charge in the Highway Traffic Act that covers eating or other distractions while driving. However, they would likely fall under careless driving because it relates to not having due attention on the road. But the ‘distracted driving’ charge is specifically for handheld devices. Our message is always: make your priority operating the vehicle safely and rid yourself of distractions. To avoid being charged for using your handheld device, you must be pulled over to the side of the road and in park where it’s clear there is no intention to drive. But sometimes people pull over onto the shoulder of the highway. You can imagine…

HYDRO HIGH Much to the disgruntlement of cottagers, the Ontario Energy Board has eliminated Hydro One’s Seasonal Rate Class. The impact? Former seasonal rate customers could see their hydro bills more than double. Sorry, not sorry, said the OEB in its ruling: “The fact that there are impacts associated with the elimination of the seasonal class does not render the decision to eliminate the class incorrect.” WHY WON’T THEY JUST DIE? Desperate times, bizarre measures. Nova Scotia Fisheries and Aquaculture now plans to kill invasive smallmouth bass in Piper Lake using poison. The province tried destroying the population by electrocution, and by oxygen starvation. No joy. The last-resort plan—dumping 35 litres of pesticide into the water—may just be crazy enough to work, say experts. If not, they should try decapitation.…

Q: “We rarely let anyone use our cottage without us being there, except for a certain friend. Recently, she called to ask if she, her boyfriend, and her kids could stay for the weekend, which was fine with us. But after, she texted that her boyfriend’s children also came and stayed the night. I am not okay with her inviting additional guests without our knowledge. Am I wrong? And why am I feeling like the jerk for having to come up with a way to say that wasn’t okay?” A: No, you are not wrong, but you are also in a bit of a tricky situation in the personal hurt feelings department. Judging by the tales of frustration told by my cottage contacts, this specific offence seems to happen all…

It is late September and the day is achingly beautiful. The sun is rising, the mist lifting. The wind is down and in my canoe I slide north along the shore. I have no destination except eternity. At this hour and this time I am the only boat on the lake, but not the only life. A kingfisher rattles out of the back channel behind the island on which I live. I know the young loon is out there fishing and, through the mist, I can hear the flocks of geese heading south: some to migration, others to termination in the marshes where the hunters wait. Like me, the hunters are up early. The geese are not the only high flyers. Already jet trails are drawn in the sky and…

Deep beneath the snow, largely unknown tiny rodents scurry through tunnels, night and day, in numbers sometimes surpassing any other furry creature in the evergreen forests across Canada. Even in summer, southern red-backed voles remain largely unseen under damp litter and moss, fallen logs, rotting stumps and tangles of shrubs, yet they are key players in the woodlands. Red-backed voles are engineered for winter survival. While omnivorous, during the cold season they stick to nibbling: on lichens; fallen tree seeds; roots; bark; and the leaves, buds, and berries of evergreen shrubs. However, lack of a thick, insulating, protective blanket of snow at the beginning and end of the winter thins their ranks by one half or two thirds by spring. Beloved of carnivores and raptors, very few of the furtive…

In my youth, a winter visit to the cottage was an infrequent adventure. Our place was at the end of a mile-long road that in those days saw no plow. The snow—there was more of it then, right?—came early and stayed late. Visiting meant walking through at least knee-deep drifts. And, since the place wasn’t winterized, we never stayed long. Just a look around, really, before we trudged out again, fleeing to my grandparents’ farm on the other side of the lake. At the farm, there was always a roaring woodstove and always some sort of delicious pastry on its way out of the oven. Those winter days in the country offered distinct physical sensations that I’ve never had in any other place. Farm weekends were typically shared with my…

From their perch high up on the cottage wall, our old snowshoes gaze longingly out over the snowy, frozen bay. Golden wood shining in the late-afternoon sun, those beavertail beauties seem to have resigned themselves to their place on the antique wall of shame, nestled comfortably between a miniature high-wheel bicycle, rusted sickle, and the ubiquitous cross-cut saw. And while they do add an air of whimsy to the ancient assembly, there was, apparently, a time when the snowshoes took their first, and last, voyage. As the story goes (passed from father to son in hushed tones), it happened in the bitter month of a faraway February. Confined to the cottage by howling winds and nose-deep snowdrifts, my dad and his brother-in-law Bob passed the day comfortably in the company…

Detail sander More commonly called a “multi-tool,” don’t be fooled by its small size. Fitted with an abrasive triangle, detail sanders remove paint and finishes from nooks and crannies after you’ve sanded the flat areas with a larger machine. Many can be fitted with a saw blade for cutting in close quarters, making them indispensable for some renovations. The DeWalt 20V DCS356B is one of the best cordless detail sanders that I’ve used. $159 Belt sander Useful for covering large flat areas, such as a deck, or when building simple furniture from new lumber, a belt sander is a good second sander in your shed. These tools spin an abrasive belt, typically to sand wood parallel to the grain. 100-grit belts work well for most belt sanding jobs on wood.…

I have to confess when I heard my father, a retired doctor and amateur woodworker, was making mushroom-inspired headboards for one of the cottage bedrooms, I feared the kitschy worst. Although he’s spent a solid chunk of his retirement lovingly restoring wooden boats and making practical, meticulously constructed furniture, it’s unlikely he would be mistaken for an artiste. But inspired by the extraordinary variety of fungi that proliferate on our Georgian Bay island each fall, my dad’s woodworking turned decidedly playful, producing a headboard for the kids’ bedroom that puts the fun back in functional. He began by researching mushrooms online; there are thousands of varieties. Some are basic brown, but he was particularly drawn to the colourful ones, like the hallucinogenic red-and-white Amanita muscaria. He soon decided to leave…

The Kijiji ad gave the impression of a trapper’s shack that a tornado dropped on the site of an ancient ruin. Jeremiah Johnson meets Judy Garland meets Indiana Jones. Clad in faded half-log and all of 320 square feet, it hunched on a small rise between granite outcrops. Linking it to the water and a few rough outbuildings, meanwhile, were a series of sunken paths, stone ledges, and enough slab steps lurching here and there to suggest the remnants of a vanished civilization. A friend’s son would later, while ascending one of these mossy, kinking inclines, liken the scene to Machu Picchu. Panache Lake cabin. Those three browser words were the sum of my real estate search. I got this whim one night to see if there was anything that…

Mathew Palmer and Melissa Mascarin are “not tchotchke type of people,” says Mathew. So they created a new kind of guest book and gave visitors to their Badger Lake, Ont., cottage an easy host gift idea to boot. “If it’s our guest’s first time staying with us, we ask them to bring a copy of their favourite book or a book that represents them,” he says. Currently, the collection is sitting at almost 30 books, ranging from a comic to a French language children’s book. “We like the idea of having a collection that is as diverse as our friends and family.” Share your guest “book” photos on Instagram with #cottagelifesub or email us at edit@cottagelife.com.…