The Journey Toward A New Lake Home

It all begins here... this small lake cottage in Southeastern Michigan on the border of the Detroit metropolitan area and surrounding rural areas.

We bought this place from a family friend in 1999 and used it as our summer place.  Then our youngest son moved in while he and our second son were struggling to get their business off the ground.

My wife fell in love with it immediately.  I had nothing but concern... it was in shambles.

We worked hard to make it livable.  There were gaps in the drywall where the wind could whip through in the winter.  The windows offered practically no insulation value.  The plumbing was atrocious.  The baseboard heating boiler needed replacing.

Still, it was to become the focal point for our family.  Our second son bought a place across the lake several years ago and my brother added one of his own this year.

Our plan, several years ago, was to sell our home and rebuild this cottage into our permanent retirement home.  The plunging economy ruined that idea for awhile.  This year, we decided that waiting was no longer an option.  We sold our home for what we could get and selected Pine Building Company in Farmington Hills, Michigan, to build our dream home.

Then the fun began.

Selecting A Contractor

When it came to selecting a contractor, we decided to use the recommendation of Glenn Haege, a well-known "handy man" consultant in this area.

Glenn seemed especially sold on a small family-owned company, Pine Building [click on image at top right to go to their website].  So we decided to meet with them.

Joe, the owner, and Lou, one of his sons, came out to the cottage to discuss what we might do.

Initially, we had thought about just gutting the lower level of the cottage and adding a full second floor.  Joe and Lou confirmed my fears: the place was a tear-down.  The foundation was bad and the walls were sagging.  Leave it or level it.

So I said we would give it some thought.

I downloaded a free piece of architectural software... Sweet Home 3D... that allowed me to lay out what I thought we might want in a nice "blueprint."  It was quite intuitive and also let me see a "3D" representation which I could make as elaborate as I wanted or keep simple.  This let Kathy and I decide if we thought it was worth pursuing... and we did.

We met with Joe and Lou again and they took the plans and came back with a proposal.  It was more costly than we were thinking of, but decided that we were not getting any younger and we could do it our way one last time or buy someone else's dream.  We chose the former.

Step one: sell our primary residence.

Getting Rid Of The Old

There wasn't much sentiment involved when the old cottage came down.  In fact, we were not even there that day because we were running our private taxi service to and from the airport for relatives.

Our neighbor, Ben, took this.

Apparently it was the entertainment for the neighborhood that day.  The job went quickly and the debris was hauled away.

Ben and a couple of other neighbors had already scavenged for items of use or metal for scrap sale before the tear down started.  We gave Ben a nice one year old storm door and a baseboard heating boiler for his place.

Ben's parents wanted to keep the cyclone fence up between our properties so that their dog could run around their backyard.  But after the house came down, we had to have the old tree stumps removed and the only way that could happen is by removing the fence into which the trees had grown.  Unfortunately, the decision to take the fence down came after the demolition crew left, so Ben, his dad and I spent several hot hours with a heavy-duty tractor Ben's dad brought and ripped out the fence.

Once the fence was removed, we were able to bring in a guy with his stump grinder to clear the stumps.

The lot was cleared for the start of the foundation.  That's when it got interesting.

Establishing A Good Foundation

As soon as the stumps were cleared, Pine Building had the excavators out in force.

The outline of the foundation walls was marked on the ground and soon huge chunks of the ground were being removed.  Talk about big equipment!

Then some bad news.  The ground at the planned foundation depth of 42" ... the Michigan frost line ... was just not stable.  It was a combination of lake silt and other shifting soil that would not support a foundation much less a house.  They were going to have to go deeper to find solid ground.

At about 8 feet, the soil firmed up.  But that meant hauling out tons more of dirt and then bringing in an engineer to design special footing for the foundation walls ... plus making the walls about 2-1/2 times taller than planned.  It became, essentially, a basement rather than a crawl space.

It also meant that a large amount of gravel needed to be added at the base inside of the foundation walls ... and a sump pump had to be added because the base was now below the lake water line and ground water would continuously seep up into the basement-crawl space without one.

It also meant that the budget was now severely strained since the construction cost was up many thousands of dollars over the original plan.  It was upsetting, but Pine Building was doing the right thing in the right way.

So we began to think about how to salvage the project without giving up the specific content we wanted in the new home.  Pine Building was to be extremely helpful in that regard.

Additional photos supplied by Lou Aiello from Pine Building [thanks Lou]:

It's Going To Be That High?

It was now the second week of August and summer was going by quickly.  It was obvious that our hope of having the rough construction complete by early autumn was totally out of the question with the delays from the foundation.

Pine Building's crews had completed the foundation and back-filled along the outside walls.  It was at that point that we realized, "Hey, when they add the floor joists, we are going to need oxygen because we will be up so high."  This was based on our insistence that the top of the foundation be above ground level on the street side.  The dirt road had been built up by the road commission adding gravel over many decades... so much so that the water drained off the road toward our old cottage.  The higher foundation would ensure that water drained away from the new house.

The floor level would be roughly at the top of the fence between our new place and the neighbor.  We might need a slide to get out of the lake side door.

The filled-in "crawl space" had almost become a "Michigan basement."  It would be low and the floor would be gravel, but it could be navigated in an upright (slouching) manner with a hard hat (which I have).  Then it dawned on me: how would anyone get in and out of the crawl space?  The original plan called for a small opening about 2' x 2-1/2' for someone to actually crawl into the crawl space.  As a pointed out to Lou, that seemed to mean diving in head first to the floor 4' or so below the opening.

Lou agreed... not a good idea.  So he proposed having an opening from the inside where a person could go down a ladder or steep set of stairs to gain access.  That seemed like a good alternative, so we began to think where that might be placed.

Meanwhile, the floor joists were being put in place.

It was now the Labor Day weekend.

Lemonade Out Of Lemons

It was now just after Labor Day and Pine Building had their framing crew in place to start putting up the walls.

We had agreed to some interior modifications based on the unexpected addition of about 700 square feet of potential storage in the crawl space.  Certainly it was not a finished basement, but there was now the opportunity for me to put into the Michigan basement all manner of equipment and old things that were originally planned for the back of the garage or the 2nd floor storage room.

We worked with Zack Ostroff, Pine Building's architect, to rework partition walls and room locations.  The utilities that were originally destined for a 1st floor utility room next to the street side entrance were going to the Michigan basement.  Then the heating system was relocated from a special attic enclosure to the same area  in the Michigan basement.

That eliminated the time and cost to build the special attic enclosure and run water and gas lines into it.  It also freed up the space that was supposed to be the utility room for other purposes... we would now have a walk-in pantry!  That saved a couple of thousand dollars for the wall of cabinets that we were going to use as a pantry and enlarged the dining area by 2 feet of width.

We did have to give some of the space back.  Our intention was to have the area under the stairs to the second floor exposed as part of the living room.  That would now be walled off with an entry door for the access to the Michigan basement.

Since we did not need as much second floor storage space, we eliminated the separate laundry room by moving the laundry location inside of the storage room (by using an adjacent closet area) and it still left us with significant upstairs storage.  That allowed us to enlarge the two bathrooms by splitting the space from the original laundry room.

Overall, we did make lemonade out of the expensive lemons.

Planning Ahead For Tile And Granite

While it is exciting to watch the structure rise, it is necessary to be planning months ahead.  Dozens of details... some not so small... must be addressed.

We had already agreed pretty much on the general look of the interior.

Downstairs, the walls would be pale blue with white cabinets and moldings.  The floors would be hardwood so that we could use our oriental rugs.  So the real choices there boiled down to deciding how expensive the cabinets would be and what species of hardwood the floors would be.

But there were other choices that we had to make.  What doors did we want?  What hardware for the doors?  What counter tops?  What fireplace?  What appliances?  What shingles for the roof?  What siding?

We focused first on the roofing and siding.  We took the architectural plans and used some graphics software to fill in various colors we scanned from siding samples.  We narrowed our choices to grey-blue and yellow ... not because we sent two sons to the University of Michigan, but because we liked them.  Then we asked for opinions.

Well, that didn't help.

I told my wife to pick one.  Well, that didn't help either.  For weeks, it was "yellow or blue?" followed by an anguished look.  The blue was more dramatic, but the yellow seemed to fit in well with the neighborhood and would not show as much dust from the dirt road.  She finally chose ... yellow.

This is roughly how the combination looks as seen from the material website without some of the additional white trim.  It will look really nice with the maple and oak turning red in the fall... and it is a cheerful color.

But we still had to be thinking about the tile and granite....

Pine Building has a tile man, Costin, who is talented and enthusiastic.  He obviously loves his work and is, conveniently, moving into the area we are staying while the home is being built.

Costin took us to Virginia Tile and Mont Granite where we spent a lot of his time and ours picking out colors and textures and quality ... within our budget ... that we believe will look good.  We got some feedback on the tile from our younger sons and they really seemed to approve.  The granite seems to have elicited positive responses, but it is quite unconventional as you can see here.

We liked that it was different and would compliment the color scheme we have envisioned for the downstairs.  It picks up a lot of the colors from our oriental rug, too.  But we realized that it had the potential to be distracting if it didn't go well with the kitchen cabinets, so we took a sample of the cabinet doors and held it next to the granite.  It really looks quite nice.

It will be a challenge for Costin to cut it in a way that makes the patterns flow well.

Water, Water, Everywhere

The irony of having a home next to a private, spring-fed lake is that you don't have the spring-fed water to drink and you do have the high water table with which to contend.

As you can see from this picture [click on picture for a larger view], the walkway and lawn are soaked from the water being pumped out of the Michigan basement sump.  The water table is about two to three feet below the ground... the same height at the lake.

The drinking water is from wells, however.  And the water is full of minerals... hard as rocks.  If you like orange-colored white shirts and sheets, you don't have to treat the water.  I would not recommend drinking it, however.

Our neighbor, Ben, put us on to a small company about 30 miles north that specializes in treating bad water.  Environmental Water Systems is run by Nick DeSalvio.  It turns out that he installed a water treatment and whole house reverse osmosis system for one of the family members at Pine Building ... small world.  For the price of a Viking range, we get decent water.  Nothing is cheap on a lake.

Taking Shape

The framing phase is fun.  You have already moved from your imagination to blueprints, but then you see if what you agreed to on paper is what you envisioned ... or worse ... or better.

The weather has been fighting us lately, but the house is taking shape.  Once the second floor was framed and the roof trusses put in place, we saw what it would look like ... and we liked it a lot.

As you can see from this view, there is a "stepped" side that adds some architectural interest.  This was necessary because the lot line on that side runs on a diagonal due to the curve of the lake.  We would have encroached on the neighbor's property without the "steps" or would have had to make the house narrower overall.

As I said, the weather has been typically Michigan for the fall... rain, wind, and changeable.  Check out this video from my iPhone as the crew tries to hoist the shingles on the roof in a 30 mph wind.   You could not have gotten me on that roof.

A View From The Inside - First Floor

Right now the interior of the house resembles a Hollywood set from the outside... lots of framing, but no real substance.  It's still a bit hard to envision a kitchen or living room or how the bed will look in the bedroom.  But it is more real than blueprints.

The downstairs seems small because 1/4 of the overall footprint is a garage.  Still it really isn't that small.

This looks back from the dining area through the kitchen area to the pantry and powder rooms on the right and the hallway with a small closet on the left.  The kitchen is about 11 feet wide and 16 feet long on the exterior wall.  That's a lot of cabinets to hang.


The living room area on the left [facing the lake] has the dining area [an 8' wall with the window overlooking Ben's yard] and a wall where the white maple bookshelves will fill.

The lakeside has plenty of window area [those are 9' ceilings so the windows cover about a 10' wide by 7' high area].  We will have to trim some of the lower branches on the maple so we can see the lake, but the neat thing is that we can see right over the fence to the lower right.  The area is spanned by trusses so that the rooms are all open.

The right side [facing the lake] will have two narrower windows and the gas fireplace.  The opening is much larger in this picture than it will be when the unit is installed.  The fireplace will have blower and can be the heating source for most of the house on cool... not cold... days.

Pine building specified Jeld-Wen windows ... low-e and argon filled.  We hope they work well with that much area.  The walls are 2" x 6" construction to allow R-19 insulation plus whole-house wrapping.  The roof will have R-49 insulation.  Doors will be insulated fiberglass... including the large, lifting garage door.

A View From The Inside - Second Floor

Access to the second floor is limited to climbing a ladder, but I took a few minutes to see the framing progress and get a sense of real life dimensions.  Pretty nice the way the space is used, I think.  Of course, I did a great deal of the designing....

The master bedroom as seen through the walk-in closet wall will have four windows for viewing and a vaulted ceiling.

The master bathroom and walk-in closet are approximately 24' long in total with varying widths because of the step-side walls.  There is over 400 sq. ft.

This is a view of the vanity area with the toilet/shower area behind that.  The door entering this area is at a 45° angle to the rest of the walls.  The ceilings are partially vaulted and partially flat at 8' high.  There will be many interesting angles in here.

This view from the shower area shows the entire bathroom and walk-in closet.  The window in the closet will provide light for the entire area during the day.

We avoided skylights because of potential roof problems.

The laundry and storage area are shown here.  The laundry in the lower right-hand corner was carved out of one of the two original 6' wide closets from the large guest bedroom.  We were going to use it for storage, but decided this room was plenty large enough for those needs... especially with the additional space in the Michigan basement.

Note to the left of the window is a 3' x 3' space we grabbed from the stairway coming up.

The large guest bedroom measures approximately 12' x 15' with a large window overlooking the street... no great deal there.

The smaller guest room measures about 9' x 11' with and identical window.

These bedrooms will share a 6' x 8' bathroom.

The side view from the master bedroom is shown here through these windows.  The one on the left has a board in front of it so it really is not shorter than the one on the right.

My wife will have her desk facing the lake next to the window in the middle.

She is already talking about cutting tree limbs to enhance her views.





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