Cottage Life

The go-to source for cottagers, the award-winning Cottage Life offers valuable advice as well as profiles, how-to articles, recipes, essays, issues pieces, and lifestyle stories that help readers look after their cottages, entertain guests and, of course, kick back and have fun.

S’more Stuff • Where you can read, watch, stream, listen, and visit—Cottage Life is everywhere

Contributors

Cottage Life

Editor’s Note: When boredom overtakes us

Your Letters: Talk the talk

Waterfront

Our favourite giant roadside attractions in cottage country • IT’S NO SECRET that people love objects in giant proportions (well, or in miniscule proportions). Cottage country, in particular, has its fair share of large roadside attractions; we’ve highlighted some of our favourites. They won’t be hard to spot. Because they’re huge.

Get the look

Reporter: DDT damage, bear cares & major storm season

Let’s play the animal weight game! • Can you guess which animal matches up with which inanimate object, based on weight?*

How fungi can help fight wildfires

A fishy outhouse makeover

The Guinness World Record for ‘largest antlers’ is awarded

Buy the Way: This couple decided to buy with family

Workshop • Big project, relaxed schedule— how this reader’s cottage bar came to serve beachy vibes and a laid-back lifestyle.

Reader Project: A DIY beach bar

3 devices to help you lift heavy stuff

Floor-insert heaters are a great cottage solution

We confronted our DIY experts. Here are their biggest fails • Even the most careful and competent among us occasionally mess up. We confronted impeccable craftsman Sean Ledoux, all-round expert Steve Maxwell, and the man who taught cottagers to build, Wayne Lennox. Here are the biggest fails they’ll confess to and the annoying know-it-all advice we offer to help.

Basements made of wood? They’re the future

Cottage Q&A: Perks of outdoor dining; storing lifejackets; septic-safe cleaners; what’s wrong with this beech tree?; swimming near marinas

I cottage on the border. Geopolitics have descended on my tiny corner of cottage country • How one Canadian cottager is navigating the ever-changing geopolitics that have descended on her tiny corner of cottage country

How one growing family designed a barn-inspired cabin to host jam sessions and sleepovers for 16

An ambitious restoration of their Thousand Islands cottage brought this family back together • Rather than drive them apart, an ambitious restoration of their hundred-year-old Thousand Islands cottage brought this family back together

Lawyers weigh in: should you take your neighbour dispute to court? • Sometimes solving your lakeside disputes takes more than an honest chat over a few drinks on the dock. Sometimes you have to level up

Their soft science can help us understand the weather, but there’s much more to see in clouds

Our cottages sit within a vast land—does Canada’s size define us, connect us, or stretch us too far?

Supersize your summer with refreshing pitcher cocktails • Is that a supersized pitcher of drinks you’re bringing outside for the gang? And with unbreakable glassware? What a serve

Dozens of animals feast on the chokecherry’s fruits at the end of the summer

Parting Shot: Time and space