An increasing number of people are spending money on renovations.

This isn’t abnormal, is it?

What if the above sentence read, “An increasing number of people are spending money on renovations….for their cottage?”

In many cases, the “home away from home” is nicer than the home itself…

It’s been a couple of days now since I returned from Port Severn, Ontario for my brother’s bachelor party weekend, but my brain still seems to be about forty minutes north of Barrie.

I can’t stop thinking about my friend Welshley’s family cottage up on Georgian Bay.  I’ve been to this cottage probably twenty times since about 1998, but every time I go up there, I gain a new appreciation for the cottage and the property on which it’s situated.

About an hour after my brother and I got to the cottage on Thursday, Neil remarked, “You know, I never noticed before that they have crown mouldings in the bathroom!  Until we renovated our condo, I never even thought about things like this.”

He’s not the only one.

When you hear the term “cottage,” what images are conjured up in your mind?

When I was a kid, we didn’t own a family cottage, as we were clearly deprived.  We were forced to (gulp!) rent.  Each year, we went to a different cottage up north, all offering different lakes, beaches, and small, quaint roofs over our heads.

I remember being so happy to see that we had an actual toilet in the bathroom!  I was accustomed to the old out-house at Camp Kawabi, later Camp Kilcoo, and the fact that we had things like a toilet and a working TV was a fantastic sight!

I still hear people say things like, “I’ve got to go up north this weekend and close the cottage.”  Many cottages aren’t winterized, and need to basically be boarded up for the cold winter months.

Not Welshley’s cottage, that’s for sure!  It’s available 365 days a year for the enjoyment of his friends…..oh yeah, and his family.

Welshley’s cottage is probably nicer than 90% of all the houses I’ve seen in Toronto in my half-decade in this business.  It helps that his mother is an interior decorator, and his step-father was a very well-known developer in Toronto.

The cottage is equipped with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, with another large room upstairs that could be used as a bedroom if it weren’t for the oak pool table and the video game consoles…

The larger main floor bathroom features a large standing shower with thick slate tile and a rain-forest shower head that makes you never want to get out and towel off.  We call this shower “the cave.”  There is also a sauna in here that comfortably fits eight people.

The kitchen is completely open concept, and designed with entertaining in mind.  The kitchen sink and prep counter faces the living room, and the stove uses Halogen heating.  Amazing, considering we are “roughing it.”  Throw in the sub-zero fridge, dishwasher, and separate laundry room with brand new front-loading appliances, and I’d say “rough” ceases to be a word used on any given cottage weekend.

There is hardwood flooring throughout the cottage, and it’s quite high quality.  Every room has either vaulted ceilings or crown mouldings, and makes use of small pot lights.  Did I mention the wainscotting?

The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living and dining room look out over the large outdoor patio, and towards the water which faces West.  During those 8:30PM sunsets, the glare is so bright that you can barely watch Tiger Woods on the 40-inch TV.

The hot tub on the deck outside seats six, but we try to keep it to four people.  The others will just have to play ping pong, foosball, or maybe bore themselves with the pool table upstairs.

While the A.T.V. might not be used every weekend, the Jet-Ski certainly is.  I don’t know much about boats, but I know the one we water-ski behind is quite fast.  There’s also another large boat; almost a yacht in the boat-house out back.

Oh yeah…..the boat house.

This isn’t your typical “boat house.”  This one has a separate guest cottage upstairs with one bedroom, one bathroom, and a living room and kitchen.  The TV only gets a few channels up there…

And last but not least, the cottage has central-vacuum!

Basically, this cottage is a freakin’ fantasy camp where people go and never want to come back.

I’m cottage-ruined for the rest of my life in that whenever I’m invited to somebody else’s chateau on the lake, I ask things like, “Who broke in and vandalized your cottage?  They replaced the granite counters with this cheap laminate!”

Then, I am asked to leave…

The saying, “Work hard, play hard” rings true for many people, and that’s why the typical cottages of yester-year are becoming more and more rare.  Sure, many people like to retreat to a small wooden shack with no electricity for a weekend, but far more people have no qualms about spending more money on the cottage than their house in Toronto.

You only live once, and if you work hard, you should reap the rewards.  With this in mind, people are spending money on toys such as ATV’s, Jet-Ski’s, and big screen TV’s, and the idea of sleeping in a tent and eating fish caught on the lake aren’t nearly as appealing as sleeping in a Serta Posture-pedic bed and cooking prime rib from Bruno’s on your stainless-steel Weber grill.

With the high Canadian Dollar, many Canadians are buying condos on the ocean in Florida, or homes on the golf course in Arizona.  Not as many people are investing in Muskoka, Wasaga Beach, or Parry Sound any more, but those that do are certainly making it worthwhile.  Renovations abound up north, and it the amount of construction going on down each country road is eerily reminiscent of a summer day in downtown Toronto.

I only dream of one day owning a cottage like Welshley’s family cottage.

But in the meantime, I’ll just continue to use his.

Many people dream of using a cottage but never owning one.  Home ownership is tough enough as it is, so how much tougher is it to look after TWO houses?

Welshley was telling me how they’re going to replace all the cabinetry in the kitchen, which might lead to new counter tops as well.

Yeah…..those new cabinets will make us take a good look at the old ones, and realize we certainly were roughing it…