Building Our Lakehouse

Hello dear friends, I hope everyone is enjoying summer.  After some hot and humid conditions we feel that there is a touch of autumn in the air!

Today I am popping in with some information on our little lake house.   For some time (a few years! ) we had been thinking that it would be fun to have a little cottage at Lake Ophelia.  It was just a half baked idea to be honest but we thought perhaps we could occasionally sleep there during some of the hot summer nights, read, entertain, use it as a guest house...but after consulting with the county we were disappointed but not surprised to find out that building a little cottage would not be approved.  So our idea just simmered in the background.

Then, a couple of years ago we decided to attend an open house at Bunkie Life, a small company not far from us that makes pre-fabricated bunkies that don't require a building permit.  The bunkies are smaller that we had originally wanted to build but we quite liked what we saw and thought that the kits were brilliant.  Unfortunately my mother became ill right after we attended the open house and the whole project fell to the side.

Last year my husband thought that we should buy a little boat that he saw advertised on line.  Off we went on a Saturday to look at the boat and I frankly thought it was the ugliest thing ever.  But as it happens that day was also the Bunkie Life open house so instead of buying an ugly boat we bought a bunkie instead.  That is the abbreviated version of how our lake house came to be!

So...we attended the Bunkie Life open house and barbecue and had a lovely lunch.  We also bought the Bunkie Life kit which was delivered very promptly.

All of the parts of the bunkie were precut and labelled.  It was my job to sort all of the parts and load them on one of our hay wagons so that we could easily access them by part number and make sure that they could be covered by a tarp to protect them from any rain.

The assembly was really quite easy!  It was like building a kit from Lego or lincoln logs.  The instructions were very clear, the quality was very good and between my husband and I we went gangbusters building our little bunkie.

The only part that was a little challenging was putting up the rafters.  We used our farm tractor and a good friend came over to help us.

It only took us a few days to get this far in between all of the other things happening on the farm.  Then my husband contracted Covid19!  And of course he gave it to me!!  So our construction project was put on hold.  We were so tired. Neither one of us had contracted covid before which astonished so many of our friends who had already had 2 or 3 rounds of covid.  So our bunkie ended up on hold  We didn't our friend that had helped with the rafters to come back as he has 2 young children and we didn't want to take a chances that they could get covid from us.  We were both so tired and it took weeks before we felt our energy levels starting to return to normal.

Well, even bad things come to an end and we recovered enough to carry on with the construction.  At this point to be honest I think I might mean my husband carried on with the construction.

We added a red metal roof.  The windows and doors were part of the kit.  The floor went in last but as it was already so very late in the season we covered it with contractors' paper to protect it, loaded it up with some garden furniture and shut it up for the winter.

Spring arrived quite early this year followed by another round of winter so we didn't get around to working on the lake house until early summer.  I knew that I wanted the lake house to feel beachy so we bought a semi transparent stain for the walls in a light colour and a different colour for the floor and the rafters,  The weather was most uncooperative with heat, humidity and rain but eventually I managed to get the walls, ceiling and floor done.

Next we wanted to add furniture!  We moved our old kitchen table and chairs to the bunkie using our lawn tractor and a utility trailer.

Around Lake Ophelia we go!

Ta da! The first round of furnishings complete!

We had a wonderful Canada Day barbecue for family in the lake house.  It was a great success!

We sometimes have lunch in the lake house.  On this particular day we were surprised by a quick but powerful burst of rain.  The open window is the perfect height for Vera.

And finally a view back towards the house.  It is just a 5 minute stroll from the house to Lake Ophelia and the lake house.

There is still much work to be done but that will need to wait for another post!

Thank you for visiting my blog and wishing everyone a wonderful weekend.