Piece by piece
Packing for cottage country is complicated when headed to a site surrounded by water
The challenge of building a cottage on an island in Muskoka,
I’ve been spending a lot of time in cottage country recently. Unfortunately, I’m working most of the time I’m there. We’re about halfway through building our third cottage on Bigwin Island, on Lake of Bays in Muskoka. Here are some of the details about the project.
The island: At 200 hectares, Bigwin is the largest island in Lake of Bays, the westernmost of the four main Muskoka lakes. (Lakes Rosseau, Joseph and Muskoka are the other three.) It’s named for Ojibwa Chief Joseph Big Wind, whose people have lived in the area for centuries. People have been camping and cottaging on the island since the 1800s.
The Bigwin Inn opened in June 1920. Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Guy Lombardo were among the many stars who entertained a guest list including Clark Gable, Ernest Hemingway and Holland’s Princess Juliana, who visited while living in exile during the Second World War.
The development languished for decades, until a new 18-hole championship golf course — designed by renowned architect Doug Carrick — opened in 2001. Since then, people have been building stunning cottages along the shoreline.
The commute: When you work contractors’ hours (early morning until late at night) you tend to miss the worst of rush hour traffic, so for most of my career the commute’s been fairly easy. To get to Bigwin, it’s a three-hour trip. Each way. Once you arrive at the marina, near the town of Dwight, Ont., you drive right onto a barge for the five-minute ride across the lake — 10 minutes on windy days.
There’s a ring road on the island for moving heavy equipment and materials around, but most of the time we get around on golf carts. When we’re up there, we stay in a rental condo in one of the original old Bigwin Inn buildings. We drive across the 13th fairway in our sixman cart to get to the job site.
In the winter, we get over on snowmobiles. For parts of the fall and spring, we’re shut out when there’s ice, but it’s not strong enough for a sled. (We learned that lesson the hard way while working on a boathouse for an earlier project when our excavator fell through the ice. Luckily, it was close enough to shore that we could winch it back onto land.) A few weeks ago, a crew working on another project up there got over on snowmobiles on a Monday and came back by boat on the Wednesday.
The cottage: The nearly 3,000square-foot cottage, designed by architect Craig Rietze of C.A.R. Design Studio, is a classic Muskoka cottage, with a mix of stone and wood siding on the exterior and an open concept on the inside.
The kitchen, family room and dining room are all connected, and there are master and guest bedrooms on the main floor, both with ensuite bathrooms. The focal point will be the two-sided fireplace with openings on the living room and master bedroom. The mantle is a reclaimed beam that runs the length of the room. The kitchen has an island with sides covered in barn board and the same material will be used elsewhere for feature walls.
Downstairs, there are two more bedrooms with a walkout door that will lead to a pool and gazebo with a hot tub that will go in later this summer.
There’s also an outdoor fireplace and a two-golf cart garage.
It sits on a 61-metre-wide rocky waterfront. The cottage itself is nicely located, close to the golf course, but not so close that you can see or hear the golfers. A tiling crew for a previous project we built camped out on the beach each night in tents.
The barge: Almost everything gets to the island on the barge, from lumber and other building materials to the crew that’s working on the project. It’s our lifeline.
We’ve probably made 30 trips across with everything from 12metre-long roof trusses to a convoy of three or four fully loaded cement trucks shuttled over to pour the foundation.
It only runs from spring to fall, and it doesn’t operate on really windy days — bulky items on the deck act as a sail, making it impossible to steer — so you really have to plan everything out carefully.
We keep a small boat on the island and leave one of our vehicles on the mainland in case someone needs to make a run in to town for something. But a trek to the hardware store is two hours, so you really want to make sure you don’t forget anything.
The people, the place: While most of our crews are guys I work with in the city, we have hired some local contractors to do some work. I have to say the lifestyle and pace up in cottage country is a lot different from in the city.
I want to give a big thank you to the barge driver, Captain Mike, and also to Mike C. — I call him the King of the Island — as he’s the go-to guy for anything you need. The project would have been a lot harder without him. When you add in the stunning views in any direction you look, it makes for a pretty nice place to call your office. Jim Caruk writes a regular column for New in Homes & Condos. He’s a master contractor, editor-in-chief of Renovation Contractor magazine, renovation editor for Reno & Decor magazine, and founder of the Renos for Heroes program and Build It Yourself Learning Centres in the GTA.