So Long, Cottage Commute

What happens to the cottage when we spend all our time there?

What would it take to live full time at the cottage? I’m not talking about packing a bathing suit and a case of tequila for the weekend, but to make the cottage a place where you will nest year round, and to move all your stuff there.

If it were me, I’d need insulation in the floor and the walls. Definitely fewer holes so the mice (and snow) can’t get in. Toilets that flush in the winter. Some way to get to the island and back when the bay is a sheet of ice. A heat source. And a major attitude adjustment.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The cottage changes us urban beings. Peace, serenity, privacy, QUIET—we yearn for the holy grail that lures us from the city to the lake. The cottage is where we decompress and hide out from whatever demons we need to escape in the city.

The question is, can you make a forever escape to the cottage and leave those demons behind? Or is it inevitable that you will bring the city—physically and psychologically—with you? If the cottage changes us in the best way when we visit for limited amounts of time, do we change the cottage when we decide to spend all our time there?

Joan and Ben Phillips fell in love with their property when they purchased an old ’60s stick-frame cottage on Baptiste Lake, near Bancroft, Ont., in 2003. It had 255 feet of shoreline and a high, magnificent view over the lake. “I don’t think we had the notion at the beginning that we would want to retire up there, because of the geography,” says Joan. “But we never said, well, we shouldn’t buy that piece of property because we can’t retire there.”

For nearly 15 years, they spent every Christmas at the lake, and every summer they enrolled their kids in nearby camps. Now in their late fifties, they