Cottage Exterior - the next big project

Most of you know that our cottage is kind of old/new.

Our cottage in all its soon to be improved glory

It was originally built in the 70s in the Muskoka area of Ontario.  It is a Panabode – which is a type of red cedar building from British Columbia that is produced from shaped cedar logs.  The joints between the logs are double tongue and groove and the whole thing stacks together like Lego (or apparently like Lincoln logs which I have never seen).  It is quite a cool concept – but notoriously difficult to add on to.  The previous owners of our cottage wanted something larger, and instead of razing the old place they disassembled it and put it up for sale on Kijiji.

Which is where we found it – a disassembled Panabode – essentially a pile of used wood.

So we bought it, transported it to our site and rebuilt it.  (Okay – it was a bit more complicated than that).  In any case the final look was a cottage that looked like it had always been there, which was appealing to us.  However, we are thinking now that it is time to deal with the exterior of the cottage. 

Somewhat shaggy corners

The first thing on the list are the exterior corners.  They are put together kind of like intertwining your fingers, and throughout the years, or maybe during the disassembly, some of them had snapped off.  This resulted in kind of a shaggy, snaggle toothed look on the corners.

Those shaggy corners again

So – if we are going to deal with the exterior – and we are – then we need to fix these.

After carefully measuring each gap (and let me tell you there were quite a few of them) filler pieces were made in either male or female shapes depending on whether the top or the bottom of the piece was missing. 

All those power tools proving to be useful

We are lucky to have some extra wood.  The original cottage had a leak in the roof at one point (near the chimney) resulting in an interior wall with some rot.  When we rebuilt we changed the interior wall to frame construction and ended up with a small stash of some correctly shaped wood which has proven to be very useful.

Tapping the things into place

These pieces are now all installed – and look a bit strange to be honest.  There is a mix of the interior finished patch pieces (from the wall) and the exterior stained cottage, but that will ultimately all be OK.

OK - still looks a bit funny

Now we are trying to figure out what to do with the rest.  I suspect this will take a bit of time.  Investigating blasting with sand or corn cobs and sanding.  A big job no matter which way it goes.
To be continued, probably next year.