This New Cottage was recently featured on Barn Light Electric’s blog: “Peggy describes the recent demolish and rebuild of her 1950s Cape Cod cottage as a massive undertaking. She and her husband wanted to preserve the old Cape Cod feel but add modern systems and construction to meet building code. Inspiration for the project took […]
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Cottage Charm – Upcycling is Fun
Creating cottage charm in This New Cottage involved loads of fun upcycling all kinds of furniture and décor! When I started to shop in traditional stores for furnishings, I quickly realized that current designs and styles would not fit in the retro cottage we were building. Neither would they “fit” in the new cottage. For […]
Right-sizing
Over the last 20 years we in the building business have seen a consistent move away from large homes. After the 2008 recession, building costs increased dramatically, due to the increased demand for labor and materials, and the adoption of stringent building and energy codes. These cost increases coupled with the demographics of retirees here […]
Details, Details, Details
Details, details, details! Creating an authentic cottage involves lots of details! However, we never expected that one of the most time-consuming challenges in building This New Cottage would be designing a seemingly minor bathroom detail! When original Cape Cod cottages were built, they were often the result of owners piecing together low-cost materials. Many cottages […]
Built-ins, Doors and Paneling – Charm, Oh My
A unique feature that we wanted to include in This New Cottage was the distinctive charm of a cottage’s built-in bookshelves, horizontal paneling on the walls, and a certain style of interior doors. I had clipped several magazines in my idea stage that illustrated these ideas. The clippings showed pictures of shelves built into the […]
The Charm of a Screen Door
Cottage charm is usually visible. Mismatched comfy furniture and built-in bookshelves define it. But it is much more. It is multi-sensory. For example, some cottages have a distinctive musty smell from being closed up more than half a year. The sound of creaky floor boards definitely cries “charm.” Anyone who has been to the unique […]
Renovate or Teardown?
Renovate or teardown? That is the question! Many customers begin their building odyssey with great ideas of saving an existing structure by renovating, a trend so popular on television and across the internet. Renovation is a great option that makes sense for some projects. For most customers, however, especially those who are considering major changes […]
A Sentimental Journey
Webster defines nostalgia as a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time. These desires or yearning can be triggered by certain sights, sounds, […]
It All Started with the Stove
Long before we decided to build This New Cottage, my husband mentioned an article he had read that linked the colors of cars in the 1950s and 1960s to feelings of optimism and happiness in the general population during those times. In those eras, cars were indeed colorful – reds, yellows, blues, greens, and many […]
Life before Pinterest
Although it’s hard to imagine “what we used to do” before mobile devices and social media, a lot of us do still remember those days! When my husband and I started to plan the design and building of This New Cottage, and with me being a scrapbooker, there really was only one way I could […]
