This past weekend, I was up at my cottage: Rock Bought'em.
Close to Parry Sound in northern Ontario, it's my family's little slice of heaven! We wait to get up here all winter long (which this year was TOO long).
Most people are under the misconception that cottaging is all fun and games, but I assure you it's a ton of work. When we first bought the property 5 years ago, it was 6 acres of thick, virgin forest. Just walking from one end to the other took 30 minutes. But with perserverence, (and a fair amount of dynamite) we managed to carve out our beautiful retreat
This weekend, my parents and I were fixing up the original 100sq foot buy that sits on its own on the property. This was the original shed-like building we used to make camp during the early days. We fit our kitchen, sleeping supplies, tools, furniture, bug spray and everything else you can imagine into it! We since painted the outside but the inside was still a real mess.
I cleaned it out a few weeks back, removed all the shelves, and then my dad kindly did the wiring and insulation for me!
We decided to go with a board and batten on the walls, with a bead board roof to give it a bit of texture. When you're working with a building of this size it's really important to keep it bright so it seems bigger, but you can also take fun risks because it won't seem TOO much.
To do the board and batten we first put up a rough plywood, primed and then sanded down. We then applied 1"x2" battens to the wall at 12" intervals and primed to get the look we wanted.
While that dried, I reprinted the front door a red colour that I LOVED, and covered up the white trim around the door window to make it more my taste.
Then it was time to do a final coat on the walls before tackling the floor. We used cloud white on the walls so they wouldn't look so stark, it has some yellow, red and black mixed in which makes it a nice "compliment white" for a lot of home decorating. You see it more than you know in magazines!
The floorboards are a distressed, dark stained hickory. They actually beat the wood with metal chains before staining it to give it the heavily distressed look (something I would LOVE to try on a sideboard or headboard one day). We made sure to line up each row so that we had a good mix of long and short, and not too many seams close together from row to row!
The finished product is absolutely beautiful! We threw the furniture we had in there, but I can see some serious decorating in my future!
The Window corner
The door and "walking space" corner
Any decorating ideas are appreciated!!
After all this work, there was only one sensible course of action left to congratulate a long weekend of work well done
Cheers!