Tackling Our First Cottage Projects!
Guest post written by my partner Joel Bray.
Updating kitchens and bathrooms definitely ups resale value, but what can you do that’ll make a big impact without a big price tag? In the case of our 1912 cottage on Ontario’s Stony Lake, there were two projects that fit the bill:
Adding French doors to two of the bedrooms
Repainting the cottage’s exterior
You can’t see the lake from any of the bedroom windows in our guest cottage — a bit of a shame for an island cottage! To remedy this, we decided to add French doors to the front two bedrooms.
The French doors not only provide a water view, but they also give the bedrooms more natural light and allow our guests to access the porch. Our cottage is only three-season (i.e. no insulation) so cutting holes in the bedroom walls was pretty straightforward.
As a designer it was important to me that the new French doors look original to the cottage. To do that we chose solid wood doors with muntins, which are dividers that go on top of the glass for added architectural interest.
The next project we were keen to tackle was repainting the cottage’s exterior. While I kind of love the way the original red paint has weathered in our sunroom (more on the sunroom later!) the paint on the exterior was showing its age. Paint is an excellent way to refresh any space but when you’re repainting multiple buildings (our cott has a main cottage and guest cottage) it’s not exactly inexpensive, so it’s key to get the colour right.
After seeing this Muskoka cottage below by Campbell Construction I knew I wanted to paint the cottage green, so it would recess into the woods, and punctuate it with white accents. It had to be a rich, dark green that was traditional yet fresh — no John Deer or army fatigue green!
Our paint colour inspiration came from this Muskoka cottage by Campbell Construction.
Picking paint colours is hard — even for the pros! The greens that looked perfect on a paint chip ended up reading too bright in person, and the dark greens that looked almost black on the paint chips ended up working best.
Painting samples on different sides of the cottage allowed us to see what the colours looked like from all angles. All in all we probably tested 15 different colours…yes, 15!
The winning green and white paint colours were Charcoal Smoke (D65-6) by Olympic and Oxford White (CC-30) by Benjamin Moore. We used an opaque stain on the siding because it penetrates the wood better than paint (i.e. it doesn’t just sit on the surface and flake off over time). We were fortunate that we could do this because the previous owners had also used a stain for the red paint colour.
On the white trim we used a semi-gloss finish because gloss is more for forgiving. Dirt doesn’t stick to it the same way as it does to matte paint, which is key when using white paints in the great outdoors!
Looking forward to sharing more cottage progress pics! - Joel