The devil is in the details

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Before the addition
At first glance you might not see a difference in the two shots of the front of the cottage, the before and after shots. The intent was not to change the look of the cottage too much. The middle shot shows what it looked like midway through the construction phase

Look closely and you will see a different colour door in the "after" shot and white corner boards. In fact, the front of our cottage which is located in central Canada has been pushed out almost 5 feet, though it would be tough to see this from a casual observer standpoint. Indeed, this was my summer project and my biggest summer project in 10 years.

During construction
We had talked about extending the screened porch out a few feet and it was meant to be a retirement project. However, the more we talked about it the more we felt that while we had the time, the resources and the energy, we would do it now rather than later. We did have to get municipal approval beforehand and we did have to obtain a building permit but those were fairly easy steps.

Honestly, it was a little more involved than I thought and it took a lot of thinking and a little figuring to get it right each step of the way.

First, it took a lot longer than we though it would take because we had to wait for construction material, particularly the roof trusses and the flooring which had to be ordered well in advance.

After shot of front of cottage
The siding was kind of a last minute thing. We thought we would reuse the original siding but determined that we need more siding than we had so we found a local sawmill that would custom make the siding for us for a pretty reasonable price. The siding is white pine and it was well cured before we stained it.

The flooring came in from Montreal and while it was not 3 1/2 inches wide (it was 3 inches) like the original flooring it was the same thickness and it complemented the original flooring better than we thought. Of course the old floor was a little "stressed" after having been down for 50 years but it was in otherwise great shape.

All-in-all we are very pleased with the results and it made for a very worthwhile summer project.

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