maximum pedalboat capacity

What do you suppose is the maximum capacity of a pedal boat?

Technical answer: about 450 lbs.

Realistic answer: 5 kids.

I bet they could've fit a sixth if he could be trusted not to wiggle and slide off the back.

They had to be careful not to overload the back half of the boat because then they were lifting the bow out of the water, rendering the paddle wheel ineffective.

At about a 50 lbs a piece, though, you could theoretically fit 9 kids on this thing.

I accept that challenge.

Bathroom lights

When I showed you the celebratory bathroom post with the new wall sconces, I forgot to include the shower light that was also installed. I'm planning to hang a thick, fabric shower curtain in the shower, so it would probably be pretty dark to have a shower in there.

We added a single halogen light, specifically designed for use in damp locations. Yeah, the halogen bulb can make the room hot, but I figure it will only be on when you're showering, and if you're getting that warm, turn down the water temperature. That lake water will cool you down in a hurry.

Here's another view that proves the light actually works. Both the shower light and the wall sconces are linked through the GFCI circuit near the sink, so if anything goes amiss, the breaker will trip right away.

Baby steps. Always inching towards improvement.

Uncomfortable chickens

Don't these chickens look like they're dancing?

Heehee!

♪ Hello, my baby ♫
♫ Hello, my honey ♪
♪ Hello, my rag-time gal....♫

This is one of my favourite BBQ dinners at the cottage. I call it "uncomfortable chicken".

Most people call it "beer-can chicken", though. Most people lack my imagination.

You start with one of these handy dandy metal contraptions that you can pick up at Canadian tire for about $10.

You wedge an aluminum can into the centre space and fill it with liquid (we commonly use chicken stock or lemonade, but really, use your imagination! Beer, pop, orange juice, etc etc. The liquid imparts a subtle flavour to the meat.

Coat a roasting chicken liberally with seasoning salt (inside and out) and jam it butt first onto the can. (hence, uncomfortable chicken).

Cook it in the barbecue on indirect heat for about an hour and fifteen to an hour and a half (depends on the size of the bird).  If your Q has hot spots, you might want to rotate the bird a few times while it's cooking.

You'll end up with amazing barbecued chicken that's moist and tasty without the hassle of setting up the rotisserie.

The one downside is cleaning the gunk out of the contraption when you're done. That's a little greasy and gross, but no different from cleaning up a chicken roasting pan from the oven.

But the chicken is Nom Nom, so it's worth it.

Toity party!

With the closet wall mended, we could once again begin moving forward with the bathroom renovation.

The half-wall was installed and the shower wall was installed. Look! It's not squashy! Hooray!

The panelling was cut to allow for the wall sconces and the GFCI. I'm glad the drywall instructor was there, he's persnickety, so it was done right the first time.

The lights look Really. Good. I need to pick up a cheap mirror at the despot this week. I also love that the model of the lights is called "Iron Maiden". Fits well with the KISS rockers on the front porch.

So, to celebrate our successes, we had a pina colada party in the loo! Cheers, big ears!

They were the non-alky kind again because we were soon going to be dashing home to a birthday party.

No glug glug vroom vroom in this house. Things get plenty silly without it.

1 step forward, two steps back

After our work week at the cottage, we had lovely closet shelves (to be a future linen closet and broom closet).

This past weekend, we started assembling the half-wall that will form one end of the bathroom vanity.
Voila. Le wall. It is tres woopsy thanks to a badly warped 2x4. Stupid boards.

When we set the wall where it would be tacked in place, and roughly positioned the boards for the shower enclosure, we came to a very painful realization: They were too close together! There were fewer than 24 inches between the vanity and the shower. It was squashy and felt cramped.  You'd almost have to shimmy sideways to reach the toity.

See how pleased I am to have arrived at this realization? *

Not. Happy.

We began bickering (because that's what you do when the project comes off the rails), with a liberal sprinkling of finger pointing, swearing, and defeat. I stomped off to the porch in a huff to sip my tea and stew for a while.

The only way to make the space bigger was to shrink the shower enclosure, but that would bring it down to 2.5' deep. Your elbow would stick out of the shower if you washed your hair!

ARG! The frustration was immense.

"What we need to do", I said angrily, "is shorten the closet wall". The finished closet wall. The beautiful closet wall, that already had all the electrical run through it. The Captain resisted.

"If I was paying a contractor to do this job, I'd be making him rip it out and fix it." I said. "We're spending so much money on that shower enclosure, it just doesn't make sense that it should be in a squashy bathroom, or worse, should be made squashy itself, all because of an arbitrarily sized closet."

Dejectedly, the captain agreed. "Let's move the wall then."

Like a shot, I was up and ripping out shelves, supports and panelling while the captain took apart the wall. I shortened the header and bottom plates for the wall, and we slid the whole back wall of the closet in by 6 inches.

And you know what? It was a big stinky frustrating annoying, vexxing, disappointing set back. BUT. It only delayed us by a day, and the space in the bathroom is now fantastic! It's exactly as it should've been. It feels right, not cramped.

It was the right thing to do. It hurt - Oh, it was one of the most painful cottage decisions we've faced so far - but it was absolutely the right thing to do, and I don't regret it for a minute.

---

*Why am I always wearing a yellow t-shirt in the work photos at the cottage? That's my "work" outfit. Rest assured, it does regularly visit the inside of a washing machine.

Night crossing

This is what happens when you don't have your act together and leave too late on a Friday evening. You cross the lake in the dark.

It was a relatively calm evening, though there was only a sliver of a crescent moon in the sky. The easy part is navigating; both the island and the shore are relatively well lit. You just have to aim for one while avoiding the other. The challenge was finding our dock in the pitch dark. I'm thinking some solar dock lights might not be a bad investment.

I felt so bad for asking Dad for his help getting us across with another load of building supplies in the dark. He is such a good sport. I'm really lucky.

The star-gazing from the middle of the lake is breathtaking. Even with a bit of light pollution from nearby Peterpatch, it's still beautiful.

If only I weren't bug chocolate, I could sit outside and enjoy it more!

Peaky prettification

While I was busy feeling useless during the bathroom demolition, I picked up a shovel and tidied up the garden beds around peaky.

Before:
(Hey... I forgot there used to be garden lights at the cottage. This photo is from our first visit last fall with the real-estate agent. It explains the black plastic spikes that I've been digging up. I wonder what good those lamps are to them now without the spikes to hold them in the ground?)

And after:
Step 1, clean up the bed. All that remains is a cute clump of frog's belly sedum.

And with a relocated hosta:

I'd like to put a small shrub (potentilla maybe? or a spirea?) at the corner of the bed near the door, and some climbing something - maybe a rose - at the back corner on a trellis.

I've also dug up the bed to the right of the door and gotten bitten by angry little yellow ants who didn't like me overturning their nest. Stupid ants.

That other bed also has a transplanted hosta.

I'm trying to fill the gardens with ultra-low maintenance "won't die if you neglect to water me for weeks" plants. Flowering shrubs. Hardy, clump-forming perennials (I'm done with the invasive plants - yarrow, ajuga,  I'm looking at you! - and the rampant self-seeders - geranium? columbine? I'm looking at YOU now!)

I also want to pick up some vinca to replace most of the under-the-cedars garden that's on the slope down to the water's edge, because nothing's growing well in that spot due to lack of sunlight.

Inch by inch, the cottage gets better.

Grand plans for the future (i.e. Not this year, no way no how!) include some raised beds behind the bunky for a bit of a vegetable garden. With some chicken wire to keep the creatures at bay.

Binoculars

The red-head and the princess got a bit bored playing with each other all-day every-day while we were at the cottage for a week.

It was a little cold that day. We don't normally wear long pants and jackets at the cottage!

By the time Friday rolled around, they were desperate for their cottage neighbor buddy, Nathan, to arrive. It was so bad, in fact, that they parked themselves on the porch with binoculars for over an hour, watching for the earliest glimpse of Nathan's parent's boat rounding the island.

The red-head even paced back and forth like a sentry.

As luck would have it, their boat hove into sight when he was in the cottage getting a drink of water.

Finally, someone to play with!

Leveling Mt. Kilimanjaro

We finally got around to "fixing" the hump in the middle of the guest bedroom floor. It used to look like this (click to view close up):

Mum stubbed her toe on that ridge every time she moved around the bed to make it.

images stolen from interwebs

One way to level a woopsy floor is with self-levelling cement, a viscous compound that flows across the floor and settles into the deep spots, thus levelling it.

If we used self-levelling cement at the lodge, I think the front windows would be a foot deep in concrete before we hit level. (sigh).

Plan B was Dad's clever scheme.
Using his table-saw at home, he ripped 2x2 boards into decreasing thicknesses: 2", 1-1/2", 1", etc. These were screwed to the floor forming a grid.

Like this.

Then they covered the grid with three-quarter-inch plywood and screwed that down.

Until it looked like this.

Once the sub-floor was in, the vinyl flooring could be installed.

I think it's high time I approached Coke about sponsoring my blog. It seems like I've got a can of Coke Zero next to me in just about every work shot!

The guest room floor is now mostly level. The only downside to the process is that there's now a small step up into that bedroom (about an inch and a half tall), but that's been fitted with some nice trim so at least it looks good.

Acorns

"Mom! It's raining acorns and one hit me in the butt!"

I don't know about you, but when it's really windy out and the oak trees are raining acorns, my first instinct is not to stand under the tree looking up. Who brought these kids!?

Quackers

Sorry, you've probably had your fill of duck posts by now, but I never tire of the feathery little neighbours at our dock.

As usual, the princess and the red-head had a lovely time feeding the momma duck and her ducklings some bread ends.

Things got a bit more interesting this week, though.

The ducks came by later when the kids were playing in the pedalboat. Seizing the opportunity, the kids scrambled to collect some crusts and headed back out into the boat.

Ducks + pedalboat = hilarity.

It started innocently enough with the hungry ducks circling the boat.

But before long there were actively pursuing the slow-moving boat around the lake. Try as they might, the kids couldn't out run them.

I was humming Ride of the Valkyries up on the porch.

Bathroom build

Now that the bathroom demo is out of the way, the rebuild can start.

Here are my high-tech drawings that were taped to the wall.

Because of the way the cottage was constructed (floor joist framing, then subfloor, then cottage walls), the end boards of the floor joists are actually tucked away under the wall of the cottage. To be able to tack down new 4x8' sheets of plywood for the subfloor, some adjustments needed to be made to have something to nail into.

The floor joists weren't on 16" centres either, so the spacing needed to be correctly slightly...

So.. really, the joist situation was a mess. Working over an uncapped poo hole made it extra fun.

With the joists corrected, the subfloor could go in and the toilet put back in place.

I was very happy when the toilet returned. Very, Very happy. The new subfloor is 3/4" plywood (rather than 1/2" chip board) which will be strong enough to support the shower. It's mold free and it's nice and level.

Once the toilet was in they worked at upgrading and resizing the trapdoor down to the poo hole. It's a composting toilet, and you need to aerate it every so often to keep things working well. That means the captain gets to climb down the poo hole and pull a bar on the holding tank every couple of weekends, hence the need for the trapdoor.

Upon the nice level subfloor a wall was built.

And another wall was attached to this wall to start the framing for the closet.

Because the bathroom now had neither door nor walls, we hung some spiffy vinyl sheets we found in the garden shed to act as a privacy wall.

We (O.K. I actually had exactly nothing to do with this, apart from dreaming up the plans) moved the bathroom doorway closer to the back door of the cottage, and hung a spanky new door in that spot.
Next to that (filling the original door opening and them some) dad build a new linen closet and broom closet. It's plenty wide, is nice and deep and will have doors that are painted to match the pantry cupboard in the hallway. Before we bought the cottage they didn't need a broom closet because they didn't believe in brooms.

Storage = good.

That was as far as the build got before our week at the cottage ran out.

Next steps include framing in the shower enclosure and building a little half wall that will act as one end of the vanity. Once those are in place we can work at installing the counter and sink and preparing the shower for tiling.

Oh, and there will be lots and lots of plumbing.