Winterizing the cottage

Strategic thinking for cottagers with familiar cold-weather conundrums

By Charles Long

Photography by Eden Robbins

Can this cottage be winterized?

The cottage was designed for summer use: cool breezes, shaded from the sun, plumbing underneath (where pumps and drips won’t disturb), and with absolutely no regard to keeping in heat. But summer breezes become icy drafts in winter, exposed plumbing suffers frostbite, and disregard for heat retention means, well, no heat retention. Winterizing won’t be as simple as buying a honking big heater and showing up in January for a cozy weekend.

This article looks at three case studies and gives you some ideas about how you could modify your cottage while keeping insulation, moisture, plumbing, and heating concerns in mind.

Three cottagers agreed to share their wishes and what-ifs as they decide how to retrofit their cottages to accommodate winter visits. Not full-fledged winterized homes, but improvements that will allow off-season weekends and perhaps a longer stay over the holidays in reasonable comfort.

They’ll face some hurdles, even though building technology has made great advances in efficient heating, ventilation, and better air quality. Most such improvements are designed with houses in mind, not cottages, where intermittent use creates its own problems. For instance, when a cottage cools, moisture can condense on the walls or, worse, inside them. If you vent, do you stick around on Sunday night until the air inside is as dry and cold as the outdoor air, or do you leave fans running? Are your attic insulation and ventilation up to preventing ice dams?

Then there’s water and waste. Heating products can keep the intake lines from freezing, but are the pump and plumbing just as frost-proof? If you leave the heat on to keep them warm, do you trust the grid to delay any hydro outages until you return? Waste is potentially simpler, but a January biffy may be even less inviting than the summer version, so can you keep the septic system flowing?

Finally, solving the technical problems may set up a few more: Will winterizing affect your property taxes and insurance? What about winter access? And is your cozier cottage now more attractive to critters and vandals?

The laughing, splashing crowds of summer seem natural at the lake. But when water, rock, and woods are under a perfect white duvet, a single human footstep in the snow is enough to jar the senses, to remind us of our impact on such places. Lowering that environmental impact, as a winter cottager, is more than maximum Rs and an efficient heater. Any winter use is a debit on the environment, more so than in summer, when the sun provides all the heat and most of the light we need. Minimizing that debit should be part of the plan. Not just the building plan, but how we use it. Do we heat every corner of the building in our absence so we can arrive to a room-temperature cottage, or do we keep an extra sweater on for an hour or two? Or do we install a high-tech system that lets us control baseboard heaters from afar? When it comes to energy, saving money and saving the environment really come down to the same bottom line – less is better.

Next:

Preserving a cottage's character

Skip to:

The winterized crawlspace
Protecting the pipes outside
Venting and humidity
Vapour barriers
Caulking and weatherstripping
Air intakes for combustion

Published in the Winter 2007 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

Copyright © 2007 by Cottage Life. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.