Hello, my name is Tim. I’m 32 and live about 35 minutes outside of Toronto, Ontario Canada. For anyone reading this outside of Ontario, owning a cottage is a very common thing here. It’s to the point where there are almost no more decent waterfront lots available within 3.5 hrs of Toronto. Trying to head north on the weekends in the summer is madness. The highways are packed with SUV’s and trucks towing their boats behind them. The stress level on the highway is through the roof as everyone is trying to get to their cottages as quickly as they can knowing full well that in about 32hrs they will have to do the same thing all over again heading south to get back home.
This migration happens every weekend in the summer and as much as us folks that don’t have a cottage laugh at the stupidity of the whole situation, we are secretly envious of all these cottage owners. To have a cottage means relaxing, playing, eating and drinking. It means getting together with friends and family. It means campfires and roasting marshmallows. It means everything that I would love to do and I would be more then willing to sacrifice a few hours in traffic each week to have my own cottage.
I set a goal when I got out of university that I would own a cottage by the time I was 35 years old. I found a girlfriend that shared my enthusiasm for camping and cottaging so I married her! And so together we started to look for a cottage we could afford. Quickly we found that we couldn’t afford to pay for a house and a cottage so we refocused and decided we would buy a vacant waterfront lot and build a cottage on it some day.
After 3 years of searching we found a lot and we are in the stages of having building permits approved for our cottage. Over the following months I will talk about searching for a vacant lot, setting your cottage requirements, things to look for, things to avoid, how to put a bid on a lot, mortgage options, cottage building packages/plans, do-it-yourself considerations, septic systems, and alternative power supply systems.
I expect to be building some time in May or June 2007 so I will also be doing a weekly photo journal to keep everyone up to date on my progress. Hopefully this will be a lot of help to people considering buying a lot and building a cottage themselves. I’m sure there will be lots of pitfalls that I won’t see coming, but I’m excited about this and look forward to sharing it with you!
Tim
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