Pictures of the Cottage

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Random pictures of the interior and exterior now that everything is finished.

 Small bedroom

Large guest room

Guest Bathroom

Laundry & Storage room

Upper hallway

Master bedroom

Master shower

Master washroom

Master walk-in

Downstairs half-bath

Kitchen

Dining area

 Living room

Other photos:

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]: