My Lake Cottage

So today I thought I would show some of the little lake cottage my husband and I bought last year. This is something we always wanted to do and we had looked at places for a while. We had been renting one during the summer on a nearby lake, but with prices low, interests rates very low and our mortgage paid off, it was time. When I first walked in the door this is what I saw-a fabulous enclosed porch with a million dollar view of the lake. I was hooked!

Turn to the right and here's the living room and kitchen with the 2 bedrooms and bathroom to the left and folks, that's it! All 700 square feet of it. There's an attic for storage which is handy because there are no closets-at all. But it is open and feels much bigger than 700 square feet. What I also saw was a dark place with lots of bad 70's paneling, except for the bedrooms which had real wood tongue in groove planks.

This place was on the market for a while and I think that people just can't imagine it other than the way it was which was dark and dated. It was owned by the same family for 40 years who took good care of the structure but didn't do much to the inside which is fine with me. We added furniture and a big table for gathering around on the porch and this is now one of my favorite spots.

We added the cupboard for storage, which came from my sewing room, and added some accessories for color. To the upper left of the sink we took out the upper kitchen cabinet and moved it into the bathroom for storage and put in open shelves for dishes and glasses which everyone seems to love. But it was still a dark room and I don't do dark.

While most of the summer was fabulous, there was one rainy Saturday night that hubby and I were there and I got a bee in my bonnet to see what was under the horrible paneling. What we found was real wood tongue in groove planks like in the bedrooms so at that point, I couldn't get the fake stuff off fast enough! There was some damaged spots which we repaired but this meant we would have to paint it instead of white wash, which would have been my first choice.

We painted it Martha Stewart Blue Hubbard from Sherwin Williams. BTW, they don't officially carry this anymore but have it in their computer and will mix it for you. It is a barely tinted blue/green color, almost like sea glass. I would have preferred white but with the white cupboards in the kitchen I thought that would be too much white. A future solution would be to paint the cabinets a different color and paint the walls white. My husband will faint if he hears this plan! The wood planks up high were in good shape so we left those unpainted and I like the contrast and the addition of the warm wood tones there. And it is so much lighter and brighter in here.

The dish wall was actually plywood so it was fun coming up with a solution and what we did was apply paintable anaglypta wallpaper and painted it the same as the walls. It's hard to photograph but here it is. I love it.

So that's it for now. We will tackle the porch area next year. There doesn't seem to be anything under the paneling out there so we'll see what we come up with when the crappy stuff comes down. We did some improvements outside too so I'll show that soon.