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Winterizing the cottage

Case study 1: Will we kill its character?

By Charles Long

Robert Pratten knows his cottage well, an advantage he brings to his first challenge: insulating. His parents built the place near Apsley, Ont., in the early 1960s. “I still have the bills for every nail and every board. Pine was the cheapest thing going, so they had the walls panelled with vertical pine boards.” Now the pine is essential to the cottage’s character, and Pratten is loathe to rip it off to insulate. Worse, the builders inserted horizontal nailing blocks for the panels every 18" up the stud spaces. So he can’t see an easy way to blow in loose-fill insulation, or inject foam, because the wall cavities aren’t continuous. Normally, they can be filled by blowing or injecting insulation through small holes. In the Pratten cottage, drilling a hole into every little cavity would leave the walls looking like a measles case.

Then there are the windows. The main room has a high cathedral ceiling, with floor-to-ceiling windows filling either end. All the windows that meet the angled ceiling were cut in odd rhombus shapes to fit. Replacing them with modern double glazing would be an expensive custom job. Pratten admits he could block off those upper windows, and then perhaps lower the ceiling to reduce the volume to be heated. But the big, light space would be sorely missed in summer.

The family is considering a stand-alone winter bunkie, a new structure that could be properly built and insulated from the start.

In cottages without such window challenges, some cottagers preserve the interior look of an exposed-rafter cathedral ceiling by adapting a technique from urban warehouse-to-loft conversions: They insulate above the old roof and add new roofing over that. A woodstove in the Pratten kitchen, and ceiling fans to push down some heat, allowed at least one camping-comfort visit in January. Enough to whet appetites for future winter use, but not a permanent solution. The family has weighed the option of sealing off the kitchen and one bedroom, winterizing that portion of the cottage and leaving the high ceiling and big windows in the main room to chill until summer. But Pratten is wary. “We’d have to insulate floors, ceilings, and walls,” he says. “And there are no vents in the bathroom or kitchen. To do it right, with vapour barrier to seal off the winter space, we’d really have to remove all that old pine panelling in the kitchen and bedroom. It’s not worth doing if you can’t do it well. Problems with moisture lead to too many structural problems.” 

When an old building won’t easily bend to new uses, the best solution can arise from thinking outside the box…literally. Given the hurdles, and the reluctance to make major changes to what is already a very satisfactory summer space, the family is considering a stand-alone winter bunkie, a new structure that could be properly built and insulated from the start. “I’d put a woodstove in it, or a propane fireplace, and maybe a composting toilet,” Pratten says. Not a mod-cons cottage, but a low-tech retreat for cozy weekends of pristine snow and winter quiet. Which is, after all, the point.

 

 

 

Winter 2007 coverAdapted from an article originally 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.