Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2021 från Cottage Life

A site to see While you’re waiting for the next issue of Cottage Life magazine to arrive in your mailbox, stay up to date on key issues and find season-specific tips for cottage living on cottagelife.com. As opening-up weekend approaches, we’ll have the latest COVID-19 news so that you can make well-informed decisions about heading to the lake. And you’ll also find how-tos, nature stories, and answers to all your cottage conundrums. Free preview is back! It’s the most wonderful time of the year on the Cottage Life channel, and there’s a lot to see. Our new show Ice Vikings premieres on March 9th at 9 p.m. ET/PT. You can also catch new seasons of Life Below Zero (March 9th at 8 p.m. ET/PT), Engineering Catastrophes (March 12th at 9…

Neighbourly love I was delighted to see a cottage on Bobs Lake, Ont., featured in “Labour of Love” (Oct ’20). The property is a testimony to incredible planning, personal fortitude, and perseverance, much of the work done single-handedly by its owners. They are active in the cottage association and have a blog documenting the history of the area. It would be fascinating to see this story run as a feature highlighting the challenges of developing the property, with photos of the current-day cottage. The owners’ lifestyle is equally interesting, as it includes maple sugar production, vegetable gardens, and a personal driving range for golf.—Becky Skidmore, Bobs Lake, Ont. Say goodbye to the smoke In Cottage Q&A (Win ’20), you asked if anyone had a solution to help Elizabeth Ramirez get…

The search: In 2001, Kingston, Ont., couple Catherine Byers and Lynn Richards got a call from Lynn’s father, Gary, who asked if they’d be interested in buying a cottage. The couple loved the idea of owning a cabin, but told Gary they couldn’t afford one any time soon. They had a mortgage and a one-year-old daughter, Kay, after all. But Gary shared with them that he’d just placed an ad in a newspaper seeking a waterfront cottage within an hour of Kingston for less than $50,000, mostly out of curiosity to see if anything would come up. “It was a pipe dream,” says Catherine, with a laugh. “But someone actually replied.” The three-acre property on Miner Lake near Frontenac Provincial Park had a 200-sq. ft. cabin and was completelyoff-grid. Catherine…

WHEELBARROWS ARE AMAZINGLY useful cottage tools, but beware of buying too small and too cheap. There are many light-duty, homeowner wheelbarrows that look decent in the store, but won’t hold up to rolling over the rocks and roots of cottage country. Expect to pay around $100 for a decent wheelbarrow, with some great models well over $300. If you’re looking for a wheelbarrow that can help you bring stuff in from the car, is great for mixing concrete, and can haul a hundred pounds of firewood, you’ll love a heavy-duty contractor’s wheelbarrow. These have a single wheel, long handles, and a large pan. Pans come in round- or blunt-nose designs, but I’ve never found the shape makes much difference. What does matter is the pan material. Metal and structural foam…

WHEN MY FAMILY FINALLY got a composting toilet at our cottage in 2010, it was the most extravagant upgrade that our little off-grid cabin had ever received. Pre-composting unit, the throne was a bucket fastened below the outhouse bench. This system had been in place for decades, since before my family got the cottage; my German grandmother felt it perfectly appropriate (“Das ist cottage,” she liked to insist). But eventually, emptying a pail of raw sewage was a chore that made negative amounts of sense when there were so many better—and less disgusting—options available. So, after Oma passed, and after a lot of research, we settled on a composting toilet. A decade later, we still love it. Alternative toilets can be more efficient and consume less water than a septic…

History on display Phil and Edie Barley’s cottage on Moon River, Ont., and this guest book have been in the family for more than 100 years. Phil’s grandmother made the first entry in June 1918. “She was the only one allowed to write in the book,” says Phil. Tucked inside are family “newspapers,” small, handwritten notes detailing what happened at the cottage on a weekly basis that Phil’s mother made as a child. Now, Phil’s family keeps the guest book tradition alive with a new log full of signatures and keepsakes: crafts made by grandchildren and old photographs. The big difference between today and 1918? “We let our guests write their own names inside,” says Phil. Share your guest “book” photos on Instagram with #cottagelifesub or email us at edit@cottagelife.com.…

WHEN American Andy Mullen realized that COVID-19 travel restrictions would prevent his family from visiting their Canadian cottage last summer, he came up with an ingenious idea: why not find a Canadian family facing a similar predicament? By swapping cottages, both owners could salvage the summer. Andy and his family have been cottaging in the Thousand Islands, near Gananoque, Ont., since 2004, so the thought of missing a whole summer was deflating. Until he had his epiphany. After hitting a few dead ends cold-calling potential candidates he found through the township office, a friend posted his request on the Murray Isle Facebook page. Murray Isle lies a few kilometres south of Stave Island—home to the Mullen family cottage—but on the other side of the border. That’s when Phil Murdock, a…

IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN FRUSTRATED by a hacksaw with a blade that wobbles, bends, or falls out of the frame while you’re cutting metal or hard plastic, you need to try a high-tension hacksaw. Made to reliably cut through many materials, high-tension hacksaws get their name from the much stronger pull applied to the disposable blade. Where standard hacksaws typically use nothing more than a wing nut (which often loosens as you saw) to tension the blade, high-tension saws usually have a powerful lever mechanism instead. This pulls harder on the blade, making it firmer, less likely to wobble, and more inclined to follow a straight cut line. As you shop for a high-tension hacksaw, buy several high-quality blades. They wear out quickly and can break. You’ll need a mix…

YOU’RE NOT GOING to let that stubborn, stuck screw win, are you? Forcing the screwdriver with muscle power alone will likely strip the slot in the screw head. You need brain power too. Clamp some Vise-grips or an adjustable wrench onto the hexagonal shank of the screwdriver. The wrench gives you more leverage to turn the driver; use your other hand to push the tip firmly into the slot. All your screwdrivers have round shanks? Move the wrench up to the handle, but be careful not to twist so aggressively that you break it. If it’s a seized nut you’re arguing with, grab some spray lubricant (WD-40, for example) and your bag of hammers. First douse the nut with lubricant and let it soak for a few minutes. Hold a…

Q: We live in Buffalo, N.Y., and we have a cottage in Barry’s Bay, Ont. Because of COVID-19, we were unable to get to our cottage in 2020. How bad is it for our 18-hp outboard—we leave it in an unheated shed—to sit for almost two years?—Micheal Tokarczyk, via email A: It’s not good. But it’s not that bad. Assuming it was put away properly, an engine could last for about two years, says Chris Pahnke of Inlet Marine Repairs in Port Moody, B.C. “If you left it for 20 years…that would be a completely different story.” Still, Murphy’s Law tells us that lots of things could happen over the course of two years: the blades of the water pump impeller could dry out, harden, and crack; moisture could cause…

THIS IS A CRAZY THING TO ADMIT on the pages of this magazine, but we never really saw ourselves as cottagers. Too much work, we told ourselves. The city is great in the summer! Plus, we love to travel. For years—no, decades—we were such reliable guests at our friends’ cottage on Lake Huron that the tent they pitched every summer in the dunes had become known as the von Yurt. That was until our two kids had grown to the point where they no longer had long summer vacations to travel with us. And the notion of travelling in the summer to increasingly hot and crowded European capitals started to seem less appealing than the prospect of chilling out with a good book by a lake. And then, in March…

We’re all aflutter this spring WE HAVE A NEW piece of art in our kitchen. It’s not fancy, it’s hardly even beautiful. It’s a bright-pink sticky note fixed to our family calendar with “Birds in Quarantine” scrawled across the top. Some of the species listed are common (robins, sparrows, chickadees), but some less so (Cooper’s hawk, brown-headed cowbird, goldfinch). We started the list last April, when my family began taking 20-minute morning walks together in the park near our home. We weren’t a “birding family.” We sang “Robin in the Rain” to our kids when they were babies, and we even took them—once—to feed black-capped chickadees, but I don’t own a Tilley hat or khaki cargo pants, or even a pair of binoculars. I’ve enjoyed birds when I’ve seen them,…

You’ve spent time planning your cottage project—now take the time in the building centre to buy lumber that’s not warped. Here’s what to look for with each board off the pile. Bring one end up to eye level; close one eye and look along a face and then an edge. Inspect for any of these deviations from a straight line. TWIST A corkscrew rotation is okay if it’s mild enough that you can clamp the board flat before fast-ening. Like any warp, it’s easier to straighten thin, flexible 1" boards than thicker 2" lumber. CROOK A curve along an edge is near impossible to remedy, so unless you’re cutting short pieces, put the board aside—please! BOW When the ends curl in, like skis. That’s not good for deck boards, although…

WE MISSED THE “FOR SALE” SIGN the first time we passed it. It was nailed to a tree a few feet in from the road. When I pulled over to park, a large boulder dislodged itself from the roadbed and scraped the underside of our car. The seven-acre property near Perth, Ont., was densely wooded, but once we scrambled through the understorey lining the road we emerged into an open forest of mixed hardwood and spruce and were able to walk easily down to the lake. We knew it as Long Lake—small, oval-shaped, about a kilometre from end to end, and with only three buildings on it, one of which was a log cabin that we had rented 20 years before for $2,000 a year. We called the real estate…

MELTING ITS WAY through ice and snow, masquerading as a chunk of meat, the pointy, bowed hood of spring’s first wildflower emerges like an apparition. Eastern skunk cabbage, a native member of the mostly tropical arum family, is a botanical wonder that lurks deep within mucky wooded bottomlands from Nova Scotia to Ontario. LONG BEFORE other plants stir, skunk cabbage expands and parts its cowl, formed just above ground the previous summer. Within, an oval knob—packed with 50 to 100 tiny yellowish florets—switches on like a furnace, drawing oxygen and burning starch from a whopping rootstock. Reaching the metabolic rate of a warm-blooded animal, the flowerheads remain at room temperature when it’s near freezing outside, some functioning even at -15˚C. EARLY IN THEIR several-weeks-long blooming period, the heated domes offer…