Our New Beach Cottage Renovation

First off, I really want to send out a HUGE thank you to everyone that commented, sent lovely emails, spoke to me directly and shared their stories with me after my last post. I was so incredibly touched by your kind words and support. I felt the love and support. Thank you. I seemed to have touched a nerve with so many others, I thought I was alone, I encourage you to take care of you if you have too many balls in the air. I caught myself just in time I think. Grateful for that, but, life is still busy! Onto the cottage info..

If you follow us on Facebook and/or IG you may have heard our crazy news.

We have done something kinda crazy. We bought another cottage fixer upper!

Yup. For real. It’s like I have an addition to cottage renovations. (is there a 12 step for that?)

And apparently I don’t like to sleep.

If you are new here, you will soon see we are kinda crazy about DIY. You may also be wondering about things like new workshops and whats going on at Front Porch Mercantile. I promise we’re still holding down the fort, teaching our workshops and keeping the shop staffed. Workshop info can always be found here and follow us on Facebook for lots of info as well. Hope you will join us soon (we have loads of fun).

If you know our story of our sea side cottage in Nova Scotia (you can read about it here and here) you know we are not own 2 home kinda people. We are definitely not own 3 home kinda people. I have not slept since we made the decision. For real.

This time, we bought a beach cottage in New Brunswick, it’s less than a minute walk to a almost private sandy beach, miles of beautiful sandbars and the water is so warm in the summer (warmest waters North of the Carolinas) and its beautiful, it’s much closer to our home, and this time, it’s a lot different.

We bought a family cottage, well, we bought my father in laws home. My amazing mother and father law lovingly built this cottage turned year round home from scratch, beautiful gardens and lovely home, we spent every summer of my child’s life hanging out here, sadly my mother in law passed away 6 years ago, 3 years ago my father in law moved “back home” to Newfoundland, and has recently decided to sell. We wanted to keep it in the family so our children and grandchildren could continue to enjoy it. It wasn’t something we had planned for this Spring/Summer, but, like everything else in our lives, we just kinda went for it, hang onto the rope and see where it leads. So there you go, another cottage makeover in the works. Crazy right?

This cottage wasn’t really a “fixer upper” not in the sense that we all think of the houses Joanna and Chip Gaines like to fix, it’s not an obvious falling down gross kinda place, BUT, we didn’t know when we started this that it was in need of a lot of structural work, so we’ve been spending a lot of the budget on stupid things like new decks and support beams. Not fund stuff. We have a lot of exterior decking issues, and some inside issues, but, overall the cottage is in excellent shape and we are just going to “beach it up”. There’s going to be a whole lot of painting going on. Paint makes everything fresher.

The only way we can make it work on our kinda non existent budget and cover all the costs, insurance taxes, maintenance etc on the cottage so I can sleep at night is to do what we do with the seaside cottage, we are going to rent it out. This means some really crazy amount of work in the next 4 weeks. Paint will be flying.

As you can see the cottage is really lovely, I will share the view and the beach soon and some more before photos.

I have given myself a very very small budget to re love the interior. SMALL. I’ll be sharing along some of my real life budget renovation costs. We have already hired contractors (we are usually DIY’ers all the way, but sometimes you need to know when to ask for help – you can read about why I need help here in this post) so most the decking that that was in rough shape has been rebuilt, Mr FPM just spent this past weekend building the rails.

I’ve been picking away at packing (did I mention we had to pack up the entire house too?) and I’ve been painting – painting and painting. Surprise, surprise, surprise. We are not buying any furniture, just reusing what is already here, adding new bedding and accessories, editing, changing, up cycling, re loving. It’s kind of amazing what can be done with some paint and a little imagination and a tiny budget.

We want to keep the cottage somewhat familiar for family, but freshen it up, beach it up and make it a little simpler for beach cottage living.

Our cottage will sleep 4-5, has 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and will be available to rent hopefully starting in July. It’s located just outside Cap Pele New Brunswick and I promise it will be cute, clean and comfortable, if you are interested in a beach rental the info is here. We call this cottage Sea Glass Cottage because of the abundance of sea glass found on our beach, and my mother in law Margaret loved to collect it! A little nod to her passion. I think she would be happy we are re loving her little piece of paradise.

 

Wish us luck, we’re crazy, we need all the luck we can get!

And just so you know…we have been taking it slow with this place, we may take on a lot, but i’m learning to ask for help and trying to take it slower, to keep my sanity and all.

Do you have any budget friendly cottage ideas for us? I’d love to hear them. I NEED some help here people!! What colours do you see in this space? Ideas? Spill…what would YOU do?

Thanks for popping in, stick around, we will be sharing LOTS of renovation and paint tips along the way.

Cheers,

Wendy