Tag: sharing

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Cottage Life

Help! I share the cottage with a DIY dud

By Elnur/Shutterstock

Q: “My family shares a cottage with my parents and cousins from both sides. I am not very handy, but a few of my cousins are DIYers who insist on doing all cottage repairs. Normally this would be a good thing, but they usually do a very poor job and a lot of projects have to be done twice, which is a waste of time. I have suggested that paying someone to do the job right the first time would be money well spent, but they say any tradesperson would just ‘rip us off,’ even though we have never hired one before. No one in my family wants to rock the boat because my cousins are good people, but I’m getting tired of paying twice for materials. How can I change this situation?”

A: Having single-handedly staffed the Shared Cottage Complaint Hotline for the last while, I can safely say that your cohabitation experience is fairly unique because most family squabbles about fix-it stuff pivot around a central axis of laziness. Usually, this means family members are unwilling to help with chores and maintenance, sometimes to the point of defiant work avoidance. But it can also manifest itself in that special form of indolence where human arms are so lazy that they cannot reach down to pick up a purse or a wallet, or peck out an e-transfer on a smartphone. Sadly, at many shared places, sloth and stinginess walk hand in hand.

You are in an unusual bind. Like your cousins, many DIY enthusiasts—particularly the new, heavily bearded kind who refer to themselves as “makers”—are loathe to spend money on any task they could imagine performing themselves. It doesn’t matter that they have never installed a 200-amp electrical service panel before. How hard could it be? That’s why YouTube exists. Besides, they saw Mike Holmes do it once, and it only took his guy 22 minutes. Bear in mind that these are “normal” DIYers we are talking about. Your cousins are outliers because they see contractors as rip-off artists rather than hired help, and they appear to be extreme in their aversion to paying a professional to ensure professional results.

For regular DIYers, doing things themselves is all about pride, personal accomplishment, and a desire to learn a new skill. But because your cousins have comingled those same qualities with miserliness and suspicion, it will be very difficult to convince them to pay actual money for professional help, even if it is badly needed. And it’s curious that they repeatedly botch jobs only to redo them. Because while enthusiasm is a big part of DIY DNA, most of us have enough self-awareness to identify a job that is just too large, too complex, or too dangerous to tackle. That’s when you hire someone who is smarter and owns the proper tools and equipment to do the job. Having to redo a project you just finished last year? It’s proof positive you were never up to the job in the first place. But ultimately, it depends on the project: messing up a garden planter is no big whoop but screwing up more serious repairs, like plumbing or electrical or major roof fixes, will have serious and expensive consequences.

I guess you could try to convene a family meeting and lobby to raise money for some badly needed work, but I fear you’d be in for a rough ride. If expenses are shared evenly, your cousins won’t want to pay a red cent. And you might find that other members of your family suffer from alligator arms and are happy to put up with someone else’s half-assed job if it costs them little or nothing. To complicate matters, you would be operating in a perilous zone of hurt feelings, given that your cousins mean well and work hard, no matter how poor the result.

I recently spoke to a cottager with the reverse of your problem. His uncle, a retired contractor, also insisted on doing all the repairs and upgrades at a multi-family cottage. He had the talent and the tools, and any work done was of the highest quality. But he worked very slowly, with many stops and starts, so small projects took forever and big ones never ended. But he always had an excuse for slow progress and was adamant that a pro would take just as long and do a substandard job. Talk about a no-win situation. The guy is slow, but he does really good work for free. How do you find fault with that without looking like a total jerk?

Short of putting up with the status quo, I can see only two ways forward in this stalemate and both will cost you a lot of money. In a weak bid to minimize hurt feelings, you could make a pitch to the group that identifies specific jobs and suggest that money for them could be voluntarily contributed by family members. It’s a crapshoot. If everyone else votes to chip in, your handy cousins might cave under pressure and cough up some dough. But if they refuse to participate, the dominoes could fall, and you might be left with meagre or nonexistent support.

Agreement in any group is difficult. When the group is related by blood, consensus is usually impossible, sometimes just because when they were both 12, Kate gave Justin a wedgie in front of all the kids at the regatta. My advice, if you can afford it, is to simply pull an end-run around the whole family and personally pay to have a job that is important to you performed by a competent tradesperson. Secure a contractor well in advance, and try to schedule the work for a time when no one else is around. When the dust has settled, tell your cousins you feel terrible because they work so hard, and you can’t even swing a hammer. Mention their dedication and selflessness. Your kin might grumble, but I bet they’ll take the compliment. I’d also give 50/50 odds that other family members will feel pangs of conscience and toss some bucks your way. Or maybe they won’t. It’s actually quite impossible to know. But when you share a cottage with extended family, the relative who risks nothing, gains nothing.

This article was originally published in the June/July 2022 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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Cottage Life

How a family of five shares a tiny 350 sq. ft. cabin

Photo by Kamil Bialous

There is a small cabin in a quiet corner of southern B.C., set against rocky cliffs above a deep, narrow slice of lake: Anderson Lake. A rack of elk antlers is fastened above the little cabin’s front door, and from the end of the antlers, hanging from a piece of twine, is a wooden sign. In a cheerful font, it reads: “Be nice, go play outside.”  

The sign is a message to the three children of Catherine Aird and Sholto Shaw, who bought the property ten years ago. “I’m always telling them, ‘play outside,’ ” says Catherine. Certainly it’s a statement of the family’s cottaging philosophy, but it’s also practical. The off-grid cabin is small and its amenities are limited. The wilderness around it is boundless. 

The building is largely unchanged since it was built by gold miners in the mid-1930s—though the details are sketchy. “Government records say that it was built in 1937,” says Sholto. “But beyond that, there’s kind of no history. There’s no one to ask.” 

For decades it was a long-term leasehold property, as were most of the other lots on Anderson Lake. (Back then, the area was only reachable via a rough, one-lane logging road from Squamish, 140 km away—and the drive took a full day.) The previous owner held the lease before seizing an opportunity to buy it from the government in the mid-1990s, and in turn, Catherine and Sholto bought it from him in 2012. 

These days, it’s an hour’s drive to Anderson Lake from their home in Whistler. You head north, hang a left off the highway just past Pemberton, and pass almost immediately out of cellular service range. The road follows a narrow valley, squeezed between peaks, until it dead-ends. There, the lake begins at the tiny, unincorporated town of D’Arcy and stretches away for about 20 kilometres, arcing north and east, sandwiched between the steep green slopes of the lesser Coast Mountains. The lake is long, cold, and deep (nearly 200 metres deep in places). Salmon surge up the length of the lake in summer, nearing the end of their long run from the ocean, while deer and cougar haunt its hills. There are 70 or so cabins scattered along the lake’s steep edges, and apart from a handful of places, all of the properties there are reachable only by boat. They’re also entirely off-grid.

So how exactly do two parents, two kids, one teenager, and an energetic Australian shepherd—not to mention regular crowds of visiting friends and neighbours—make a no-frills cottage life work in just 350 sq. ft.? They go play outside.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote in Walden about his life in a small cottage on Massachusetts’s Walden Pond. But at one point in the book, he also describes a large, metal box he’d seen in a railyard and speculated that it wouldn’t make a bad home base either. “Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box,” he wrote, “who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this.” 

For Catherine and Sholto, the property on Anderson Lake was an opportunity to buy up a small cabin. They’d heard about the lake, and the rare opportunity to buy a place there, from one of Sholto’s fellow lawyers in Whistler. “Who would need a cottage when you live in Whistler?” Sholto asks. “It’s not a big city. You can walk or ride your bike to any of the lakes there.” But at the time, Whistler had just co-hosted the 2010 Olympic Games, and the town was a long way from being a quiet wilderness idyll. (It’s only gotten busier since—these days, at least in non-pandemic times, Whistler receives three million visitors annually.) Anderson Lake, on the other hand, was and still is tucked away from it all. “There’s no cell service. No marina. No hotels. No bars,” says Sholto. “There are no rental properties, because nothing is turnkey. People go elsewhere.” Its out-of-the-way location and lack of infrastructure had kept it affordable. And the stark granite of its cliff walls reminded Sholto of his childhood visits to camp on Georgian Bay. The family went for it. 

After they’d bought, they had a choice. “Either we had to redo the whole cabin,” says Catherine, “or we had to live outside.” They decided on the latter, and instead of expanding the little cabin, they built extensive decking around the building, a large wooden tent pad on the cliffs above the lake, and a larger dock. Inside, a kitchen area occupies one corner, and a small table and a couple of chairs, another. Beyond them, there are two couches that fold out into beds, and a woodstove. A ladder leads up to a sleeping loft that is almost entirely filled up by another two mattresses. Catherine and Sholto filter water from a nearby waterfall-fed creek and they get their power (just enough to run a wireless router, LED lights, and the coffee grinder) from a small solar panel array. There’s a composting toilet out back, partially tucked beneath the eaves of the cabin, and an outhouse a short walk from the main building. 

There were a “series of reasons” why they decided to leave the cabin as is, says Sholto. At the time, “we didn’t have a choice financially. And with it being off-grid and water access, it’s a chore to do anything, to get any tradespeople here,” he says. At some point, the family might renovate or add on to the cabin, they admit, but right now? “It’s complicated, and we don’t care that much,” says Catherine. “We don’t need more.”

They were a smaller family when they first arrived. Tristan, now 18, is just old enough to remember life before Anderson Lake. Colin, 11, was a baby when his parents bought the cabin, and Chloé, 9, came along soon after the purchase. (Snowy the dog is another latecomer.) Even so, in a pinch—on a rare rainy day, say—they can all eat and sleep inside. 

The outer deck is their main dining room. It holds a much larger table and chairs, and a set of couches as well. Chloé and Colin like to pitch their own tents on the wide, roomy dock (no one has ever tossed and turned themselves into the lake in the night, they note) while Tristan more often puts his up on the tent pad at the south end of the property. Catherine likes to roll her sleeping bag out in the open, under the wide expanse of a clear night sky. There’s nothing but the occasional solar-charged lantern at a distant neighbour’s place to interrupt the darkness, and Anderson Lake lies in the transition zone between the high Lillooet desert and the heart of the Coast Range. So for the most part, in summer, the area is hot, dry, and free of bugs. 

“It’s peaceful and quiet,” says Catherine. And although there’s lots of wildlife close by—really close by: a cougar recently walked “right up” to a cottager with a cabin on the north end of the lake, she says—no one is ever concerned about sleeping outside, exposed. “We know the animals are there,” says Catherine. “But I’m more worried about a branch falling down in a windstorm than I am about cougars.”

A narrow footpath runs up and over the hill to the nearest neighbour’s cabin a few minutes away—one of Catherine’s closest friends who bought the property next door. But in full summer, they’re more likely to swim or paddleboard over for a cocktail, rather than walk. They also sail, kayak, waterski, hydrofoil, and go tubing on “an inflatable hot dog,” says Sholto. Well, the kids do. “We thought a hot dog would be less deadly than an actual tube.”

Sometimes they all climb in the powerboat and explore the lake, finding secret picnic spots and hiking to waterfalls. Catherine is into long-distance swimming: she’ll pull on a wetsuit and slip into the lake for an hour or more at a time, towing an orange floatie behind her for safety as she strokes past the neighbours lounging on their docks and decks. “It’s a good workout,” says Catherine. But more importantly, it’s a beautiful workout. The water is cold (“It’s not for the faint of heart,” she says), but clear. “You can see 70 feet down. I see schools of fish when I’m swimming. It’s like being in the Caribbean.” 

Their lives revolve around the water, and that’s what makes the property and its possibilities feel so expansive, regardless of the cabin’s size. “Go play outside” might just as well be “go play in the lake.” 

The Wi-Fi lets them communicate with the outside world, but it’s usually off. The kids—and their parents—“are forced to be unplugged,” says Catherine. And for the most part, the children get it. Colin, asked if he ever finds the cabin too small,  responds—and not surprisingly—“There’s lots of room outside.” He spends his time sailing in the family’s small boat and jumping off the property’s rocky cliffs with his friends—both the children of other Anderson Lake families and Whistler friends who come down to their cabin to visit. The cliff-jumping sessions can be marathons: up to three hours of plunge and repeat. Chloé likes to chase lizards and snakes, and sleeping in her tent, in part because it’s so quiet out there. “There’s not a lot of noise when my dad makes coffee in the morning.” 

(Colin: “You wake up earlier than when he makes coffee anyway!” Chloé: “That is not true.” Colin: “That is 100 per cent true!”)

These days, Tristan doesn’t always go to the lake with the rest of the family. He’s old enough to stay home in Whistler alone. He works in restaurants in the summers, and he has sports and other commitments tying him to town. “It’s just pretty far from everybody and everything that’s going on,” he says.

His rapid path to adulthood is part of the reason why Sholto and Catherine have never wanted to get bogged down in renovations and expansions. “We’ll do all that and then we won’t have time to enjoy it with our kids,” Catherine says. “When you have one that’s a teenager, you realize how quick it can happen.”

Of course, even without renos, there’s a lot of work behind a deceptively simple existence. “It takes so long to get everything done,” says Catherine. But at Anderson Lake, “everyone helps each other.” Each spring and fall, the couple and their immediate neighbours have to set out and then haul in the sprawling network of pipes and hoses that bring water to each family, carrying the hardware along steep forest trails on foot. Everything on the property has at some point been driven to the boat launch, unloaded and then reloaded into a small craft by hand, ferried to the property, and then unloaded again and hauled up the hill: basics such as food, lumber, propane to keep the fridge running, but sometimes the loads are more memorable. When they first bought the cabin, they planted two young apple trees and a peach tree. (The apples are thriving; the peaches get ravaged by the deer.) But on the day they bought the trees and drove them down, they already had a full load for their little aluminum skiff. So Catherine and Tristan, then still a child, paddled the potted saplings across the lake in a canoe. 

There’s something timeless about the cabin on Anderson Lake and the style of cottaging that it requires—or, perhaps, that it helps us to recover. It’s an existence stripped down to bathing suits and sand and sweat and sunscreen; active days and dark-sky nights; cold water and warm sleeping bags. 

In 1936, at around the same time that the building was first nailed together, the American philosopher Richard Gregg raised a concern that echoes loudly today. “It is time to call a halt on endless gadgeteering,” he wrote. “We think that our machinery and technology will save us time and give us more leisure, but really they make life more crowded and hurried.” It’s hard to imagine which gadgets he may have been fretting over then. Certainly, we have a much wider selection today. But Anderson Lake is a reminder that actually, the solution to “endless gadgeteering” is simple. Be nice, go play outside. 

This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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Cottage Life

Are you sharing the cottage with a slacker?

By Marko Aliaksandr/Shutterstock

Q: “I share a cottage with a sibling and two cousins. I’m the only ‘handy’ owner, but we all pull together for chores and big improvements—except for one of my cousins. He doesn’t lift a finger to help and avoids the work weekends that we have twice a year. He pays his share of the cottage dues, but that’s all he does. The others don’t seem to think it’s a big deal, but I’m starting to get mad. How do other cottagers do it?”

A: A brilliant entrepreneur I know (my wife) has this to say about co-ownership situations: “Ideally, when starting any new venture, the only business partner you should have is the bank.” Wise words. And I think the same could really be said about cottage co-ownership which, with family or others, is a situation to be avoided at all costs. If only to preserve your own sanity.

But for a great many cottagers, myself included, that perfect world does not exist. I feel your pain because at one time I shared a family cottage with my three brothers. We definitely experienced bumps along the co-ownership path, but work sharing wasn’t one of the problems, even though we had wildly varying skill sets. Like most cottagers I know, we each did our best according to our own aptitude. For example, one of my brothers had a physical disability, so he couldn’t build docks or hump asphalt shingles up a ladder. But he was a trained chef, and kept the chuckwagon open, turning out three squares a day so the rest of us could stay focused on the dirty job at hand. At the end of the business, he’d help clean up and pass out cold beer. All in all, a full and fair contribution. 

But a distressing number of cottagers are so inept that they represent a liability and a menace when it comes to cottage work. They are afraid of heights, cannot decipher the markings on a tape measure, and regularly lose their grip on swinging hammers. These people are very real, and you probably know at least one of them. The few that I know are well aware of their shortcomings in the handy department, but they compensate the old-fashioned way, with a liberal application of cash money. They spring for boat gas or buy an expensive new tool for common use. These bunglers are useless on the job site but will happily pay out-of-pocket for a new cottage sofa. Yes, they are buying their way out of work, but at least they try to contribute.

It sounds like this is not the situation at your cottage. To be blunt, your cousin seems like a complete jerk. Anyone who routinely shafts his co-owners—his own kin—with all the cottage grunt work, and does so knowingly, deserves a fiery eternity emptying Satan’s latrine with a sauna dipper. Maybe you could buy him out. Who knows? Your cousin might be happy to take the money and run, but I realize this could be impossible if the rest of you can’t afford to pay him to go away. (Plus, some sharing arrangements have legal agreements that lay out specific rules for buyouts and can include some sort of shotgun clause that could result in you losing your share of the place.) Your situation seems even more complex because it doesn’t sound like the other owners think your goldbricking cousin is a problem.

Personally, my go-to for these sorts of issues is public shaming. Start referring to the skiver as “my lazy-ass cousin” whenever he is within earshot. Make a sign for his bedroom that says “Count Slackula’s Den of Sloth.” At dinner, set out place cards for your co-owners. Susan’s might have a picture of a pretty bird, Tom’s a cute chipmunk, but Braydon, who doesn’t help out? His says “Deadbeat Bum” beside a photo of a bloodsucking leech. You get the idea. The possibilities are limitless and this approach is really fun.

That said, I have been repeatedly informed that public humiliation isn’t really “in” these days, so here’s plan B. The proper thing to do, the grown-up rational approach would be to seek consensus with the other owners before sitting down with Mr. Lazy Pants for a friendly and constructive meeting where you can talk about the subject in a blame-free, non-judgmental environment. Use powerful “I” statements: “I feel so frustrated with the whole situation” or “I just want to understand what’s going on here.” Maybe he will come to see your side of the issue and a new era of cottage cooperation will dawn under a halo of warm light, bringing hearts and hands together. You can certainly try this approach, but I think we both know that a habitual shirker like your cousin knows how to game the system and has done so for years. Clearly he is the kind of person who doesn’t bring wine or beer to a cottage weekend and selfishly eats all the pecans in the mixed nut bowl.

I am aware that it is impolitic to offend delicate sensibilities. Mustn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, right? Well, in this case I think you might need to employ some direct action towards your cousin by getting right up in his grill. Call it Plan B, Part 2, where you forcefully explain your side of things. Ask if there’s a reason for his behaviour. Don’t back down, and don’t let him squirm away. Make it very clear that the other owners are 100 per cent with you on this matter, even if they have never formally said as much. Explain that he is hurting your feelings (see what we did there?) and that the rest of you need his help to make this cohab a success. (“It’s tearing us apart!”) If you could squeeze out a few tears, that would be great. You need to use guilt as a power tool. (“Susan cries every night!”) I am convinced that you will get a powerful and emotional reaction out of him. And if you don’t, it’s a pretty good indication that he might be trending in the direction of narcissistic sociopathy so maybe you should lock your bedroom door and sleep with one eye open. Because when you share a cottage with blood relatives, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

This article was originally published in the August/September 2021 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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Cottage Life

How to share a rental cottage (while keeping the peace)

Photo by Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Splitting a rental cottage with a big group is a great way to keep costs down. But a dozen friends or family members in close proximity can create some challenges. 

The key is communication and planning, says Samantha Aguirre, who has split a cottage with friends every summer for the past eight years. She shares a few tips to keep things running smoothly so your group can have a memorable cottage getaway.

1. Communicate before the trip

The first step should be discussing everybody’s expectations. While you may be content to lay in a hammock for a week, others might have a long list of must-haves. To make all this communication simpler, create a text chain or group chat to help coordinate the trip. “We have a group chat on Instagram,” Aguirre says. “We confirm everything there so everyone’s on the same page.”

2. Nominate one person to take charge

It can be helpful for one person to take the lead, Aguirre says. “I tend to be the organizer. We found through the first couple years of cottaging together that it’s just easier to have one person who takes charge.” It’s also better for your host if they have one person as a point of contact for the rest of the group.

But the organizer doesn’t need to do the entirety of the work. Ask people to volunteer to manage different parts of the trip, such as driving, navigating day trips, or bringing games and movies to the cottage. 

3. How to split the costs

As the group’s organizer, Aguirre pays the full price and then collects the split from each member of the group. It’s typically a simple formula, though she admits it’s trickier when people visit for the weekend, for example, rather than the full week. 

There are a few ways you can divide the costs of a rental cottage. It can be split by person, by room, or proportionally, per person per night. If this sounds like too much math for a vacation, you can use an app like Splitwise to help keep track of shared expenses. You’ll also need to consider what happens if someone drops out and whether they’re still responsible for any costs. 

4. Master cottage meal planning

Meal planning can be simple if you plan ahead and stick to the basics. Aguirre asks everybody to bring their own snacks, but otherwise, she buys the majority of the meals and then splits the costs. She even does some prepping before the trip. “It just makes life easier. We just pull things out of the freezer, let it defrost and cook it.” Alternatively, if you’re sharing the cottage across multiple families, each family can be responsible for one day or one meal, from the prep to the cleanup.

5. Determine sleeping arrangements ahead of time

Not all beds are created equal. Rather than first come, first serve, try to allocate rooms during the planning stage to avoid any squabbles. But Aguirre says her group has never had any disputes over sleeping arrangements. “The single guys crash on the bunk beds, the couples take a room with a double bed, and the odd straggler who’s up the latest takes the couch,” she says. “Sometimes we try to get the drivers a good bed if they’re doing a lot of driving for a day trip.”