The Little Ol' Wagon

Our friends Ann and Tom were moving from their family home to an appartment so they needed to downsize.  One of the items they kindly gave us was a children's wagon. We have had it sitting in our backyard and I used it for gardening supplies and it held plants in pots for one year. The wagon was showing its age plus wear from being outsdie and then last year the bottom rotted out.

Bob decided we should take it to the lake and maybe he could use it for hauling supplies from the boat to the cottage. His first step was to make the little wagon sound again and then to try it out.

 It is too late to paint it this year but that will be part of our "We will have to do that next year" List.

You dont have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.

                                              Mark McCormack

A New Light Fixture

 

We have never liked the original lighting fixture that was located over the pass through counter of our kitchen. We finally found something we could agree on at IKEA but it turned out to be the ultimate IKEA Hack. The light would not hook up to our unusual cottage electrical system, and besides that normal Ikea light bulbs, even though they are very energy efficient, drew too much power to light up.

 

The light is supposed to hang way down and the space is much too small for the lamps design so we umm...  rearranged it. Poor long suffering Bob made it work. It is amazing how Bob can find a creative solution to any problem.

 

We are even going to change it to a dimmer switch so we can have bright task lighting when needed, or perhaps a little mood lighting.

 

 

 

 

 

The IKEA Kroby Pendant Lamp started off like the picture below and is a great product.

The fact is that our Island Cottage is mainly solar powered and designed for minimal energy usage. This creates a lot of challenges that we take pleasure in solving.

 

The Chair Part 2

The chair we found a few weeks ago is all ours and fixed up now. We are fondly calling it our "drift wood chair" because we believe it was drifting in the water and someone fishing nearby got it out of the water and threw in on the dock to get it out of the way of the boats.

Bob worked hard at sanding down the roughest, most beat up spots but it really could not just be stained so it we were going to paint it we went all out with a vibrant blue. I love it! I keep finding myself plopping down on the chair in the backyard of the cottage. It seems that I always really wanted a comfy chair back there and never even knew it.

"Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs".
~Fran Lebowitz

The Lost Chair

We arrived at our island dock to find a chair sitting there. It is an an Adirondack chair or Muskoka Chair depending on your point of view.

We were a little worried at first.. was someone on the island? Was the cottage still secure? We wondered if the chair was left behind by someone who had been fishing off of our dock recently. Perhaps the chair has been floating around the lake for a while and someone fished it out and threw it on the dock to keep it out of the way of unsuspecting boaters.

I left it right where we found it on the dock this week. Perhaps it's owner will come back and claim it. However, just in case it isn't gone by next week, we will take out a sander, and some stain and I plan to be ready to make this old lost chair one of our own.

We will probably never know the whole story behind this beat up old chair, but maybe we will provide it with a future.