Wendy Peter
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Bringing Back
​Banchory Lodge

How we found it...  Summer paradise, meets hoarders paradise!

1/14/2021

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The summer cottage. The mere words evoke images of sun-dappled woods and sparkling waters, breezy screened verandas, and the promise of lazy afternoons. Often our most treasured retreat, the cottage has become a metaphor for relaxation, escapism, and family kinship. Above all, it's the place where we can cast off our city shoes and worries, sink into an old porch rocker, and simply be ourselves... Judy Ross ​
Not only are summer cottages the depository of people's most cherished memories, they often are the depository of anything the family has collected along the way that they can't quite let go of for one reason or another. Whether it's a comfortable family chair or a long-ago mother's day gift, these items always seem to migrate to the family cottage. 
In the Banchory Lodge cottage of my childhood, it was no different and there was quite an eclectic collection of furniture, all of which had a story. "Those little blue chairs came out of the Sunday school rooms of ________ church." and many other such tales attached to everything from the china cabinet to the outdoor furnishings.
 ​In addition to this, the walls in the bedrooms did not reach the ceilings. I assume this was done for airflow, but it also made a great place for my Nana to keep her extensive collection of small china figurines and tchotchkes. I used to stand on the top bunk bed in the veranda to play with these items for hours. There were birds, small animals, and many "made in occupied Japan" trinkets that fascinated me. When my parents sold the cottage I kept a very small selection of these items, although I wish now I had kept a few more. They are still with me and perhaps they will make their way back now to Banchory Lodge 2.0. 
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So it should have come as no surprise to us when the agent showing us the Winnipeg Beach cottage seemed to be a bit nervous before taking us inside. On the surface, the cottage seemed to tick all of the boxes of what I could ever want in a summer place. It was big enough, having started it's life as a 12 bedroom Inn, (I'll share more about that later). It was right next to the lake, in fact you could see the water from the front yard, and it was built in 1910 so it should have had the vintage charm that the first Banchory Lodge cottage had held for me. But it seemed that the agent was trying to prepare us for things to be "less than charming" to say the least. She told us that "it's a bit like a museum inside" and "other buyers have been overwhelmed by this cottage and walked away". And so as she went around the back to open up and let us in through the screen porch, we braced ourselves, imagining the TLC show about hoarders and thinking that we would likely have to rent a large dumpster if we decided to purchase the cottage. ​
Well, the interior was not quite as bad as I was anticipating, but we definitely had to look past all the "stuff" inside and picture the bones of the cottage and its long term potential. Massive gothic antiques and silver tea sets were mixed together with saggy sofas, a mid century mod bar, and an endless china collection. There was really no rhyme or reason to it, but like I said, "the family cottage becomes the depository of souvenirs from every kind of life experience" and clearly these owners had experienced an eclectic journey. For those of you who have known me for years, I think it could be said that I thrive on taking things from broken to beautiful. So as we toured the cottage, I was becoming increasingly excited, while Murray my partner in adventure for the last 35 years was likely thinking... "Oh no! Here she goes again"!
This is the cottage as we found it, plus my vision for what we will do with it...
The Screen Porch 
The agent knew exactly what she was doing by letting us enter by the screen porch. Nothing says lake living like a screen porch and this one was huge. 12ft x 22 ft, it had room for both a dining and sitting area and I was already picturing lazy afternoons laying on the feather daybed that I had rescued from the original Banchory Lodge back-yard. The decor seemed to be wicker meets office furniture, but it was easy to see past that, at least in this space. ​
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​The vision for the screen porch: Vintage wicker furnishings, and an antique table to eat at. 
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The Dining Room
This was also a huge room (remember this cottage started as an inn). 12'x18' with 14-foot vaulted ceilings, but it only had a very small table in the corner and numerous antique furniture items pushed against the walls. It did have beautiful transom windows, but someone had fogged them over with some kind of film. ​
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The vision for the Dining Room- A huge table that will seat up to 16 people, off white walls, navy trim and a side server and hutch in coral red. Casual vintage chairs, and fun nautical accents. Yes, of course we are doing a nautical theme.. it's a beach house! 
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​The Great Room 
When I was a child there was a show about a friendly giant that opened with the words "look way up" ... those were the exact words that went through my head when we stepped into the largely untouched great room. It had vaulted 20 ft tall ceilings and was full of strange antique furniture. There were also several weird cartoons painted on some of the walls. This room was also really large 18x18, and it appeared that some of the original doors leading off of it had been closed off sometime in the past. 
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​The vision for the great room is quite simple. "Add white"... but not on the walls. It turns out that this cottage is one of the few remaining in Winnipeg Beach that still has its original unpainted (if you don't count the cartoons) walls. So with the overall goal being to restore this cottage back to its vintage style, we have decided to keep the walls in the original cedar. The floors are also original wood and will be refinished, and all of the cartoons will be removed from the walls.
Here are the vision photos... Think, casual slipcovered canvas sofas, comfortable side chairs and fun nautical accents. The fireplace will be repainted in a cream tone and refitted with gas logs. 
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The kitchen 
​All I can say about the kitchen is that it looks like someone refitted it from a 1980's staff room. On the positive side, there is an attached walk-in pantry, original farmhouse sink, and charming plate wall reminiscent of an Irish dresser... 
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The vision for the kitchen is to gut it completely. We will only keep the farmhouse sink. I have purchased a vintage wood kitchen out of an older home and we will be painting the cabinets the color seen below in the inspiration photos. We will be adding wood countertops and closing off the doorway on the end wall of the kitchen, which will allow us to have an L-shaped kitchen with a centre island.  We will reopen the great room doors which have been boarded shut in order to gain entry to that part of the cottage. ​
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The Bedrooms
I am only going to show a couple of photos of the bedrooms here because there are so many. There are currently 9 bedrooms of all different sizes and shapes. This is due to the original walls from the twelve small bedrooms being moved several times. We plan to resize the bedrooms down to 6 medium-sized bedrooms, and then turn the extra bedrooms into a den and second bathroom. The bedrooms all look similar. They are old, basic, uninsulated and you can even see the light shining through the walls in some spots. All of the bedrooms were overflowing with stuff. Some were so bad we couldn't even open the doors due to the amount of clutter in the rooms. These are two of the tidiest rooms. 
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Look at these amazing vaulted ceilings that go over all of the bedrooms. 
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​The vision for the bedrooms.
​We will be sealing, and insulating all of the bedroom walls, and bringing them up to full ceiling height. Sorry, Nana, there will be no spot for nick-nacks! We will also be finishing the walls with tongue and groove pine that has been whitewashed. The vision for the bedrooms is an Air B&B look with beautiful light-colored bedding, and vintage quilts. 
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​Did I mention that this cottage is HUGE..?
​As we toured it that day, it just seemed to go on and on. One of the strangest rooms was a long 8 ft x 27-foot space that had been covered in OSB board and varnished. This space as far as we can tell was originally bedrooms. We will be converting it back into one bedroom and a den. The den will retain the OSB board and be done up with a vintage fishing theme. The other room will need to be re-boarded with beadboard walls and ceiling. It's impossible to show the whole 27 feet, but these photos show two views of the room. 
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​The final room I will show you is the bathroom, which runs off of a large mudroom with laundry facilities. 
The bathroom was actually "ok". It will only get a cosmetic overhaul, as we will be adding in a second bathroom with a vintage clawfoot tub in one of the old bedrooms. 
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​So that's the tour of our beach house project. Banchory Lodge 2.0. We are planning on a 2-3 year renovation including the exterior of the cottage and I will be updating my progress here. The last two photos I have posted here is a pencil sketch floor plan of how the cottage was laid out in 1910 when it was built, and how we plan to lay it out during our renovation. 
I do have some interior design software that will print out a floor plan, but there is something about a piece of graph paper and a pencil that is much more satisfying when designing a home. 

Original 1910 layout with 12 bedrooms. There was no screen porch. 
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Updated plan for Banchory Lodge 2.0.  Six bedrooms, 1 Den, two bathrooms, L-shaped kitchen with island. 
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​In my next post, I will show you the one room that we have already completed! 
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Where it began

12/7/2020

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​For years during my twenties and thirties, I had a repeated dream. It was always the same and would start with me standing outside of our old family cottage "Banchory Lodge" which was located in Grand Beach Manitoba and which my parents had sold in the early 1980s. In the dream, I would pry open the rear door or sneak in a window and resume living in the cottage I remembered from my childhood. The dream would always end with the new owner catching me there, and me trying to explain my way out of the predicament I had found myself in.  
While I am sure a phycologist could read some deeper meanings into this repeated dream, I always woke up with the same thought. I missed the cottage, and clearly, in my dream, I was trying to get back there somehow. 
Now in my 50's as I write this, it is obvious to me, that I wasn't so much trying to break into the cottage, as I was trying to find my way back to something very special which my family had for generations held onto, which was in essence, a way of life. A way of life which reached out and said: "come on in, your welcome at the party and there is always room for one more around the table."
This legacy of connection and celebration had been founded in the 1930s when my grandparents Hugh and Eileen Mailey first purchased Banchory Lodge cottage as a summer home for themselves and their three daughters Lorna, Lois, and my mother Linda. With their families coming to Canada from Ireland and England early in the century I am sure it was quite an accomplishment for them to be able to do this. I saw this photo of the two of them at the beach around the 1930s, and as they are not posing in front of the cottage, it may be prior to them buying it. My aunty Lorna told me that they rented the cottage for a few years before purchasing it. Apparently the old lady who originally owned it was a local bootlegger. It's funny to imagine all of the things that a historic building has born witness to over the years. Did people really sneak up to the back door of our family cottage to buy whiskey? All I know is that whiskey, tea and beer were always on offer during my grandparents ownership of the cottage. 
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Just a normal part of Irish hospitality. After all you need to whet your whistle if your going to sit a while and tell some stories.  ​
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My family albums are full of photos of my mom and her sister's, and then my own and my cousins wonderful growing up years at the cottage, playing, swimming, and riding in our grandfather's boat named "The Party Doll". Banchory Lodge was a central gathering place for their extended family and friends, and although the cottage itself had only two tiny bedrooms, and a front veranda, I counted more than 20 people staying there many times in my childhood, and I am told that it was much the same at times during my mother's early years. Our "nana" was at her happiest when she had her arms overflowing with grandchildren. Ten eventually (Tracy, Wendy, Jim, Ken, Denis, Diane, David and our dear USA cousins Lisa, Loreen and Leon.) 
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Family legend has it that even the hammock and patio loungers in the backyard were used more than once as beds over the years, and perhaps even by people who wandered by and saw the word Banchory "Lodge" and wanted somewhere to sleep, since my grandparent's Irish hospitality was so inclusive. As my generation got older our USA cousins would visit during some  of the summers, and  my Dad's brother Dwight brought his family out on weekends with daughters Debbie, Deana, and Bonnie. Our dad's taught us to waterski while spending whole days at the lagoon with the boat, where my mom and Aunties would arrive armed with dozens of sandwiches and gallons of Kool-aid. 
It was a carefree place, full of food, fun, drinks, and stories, and probably a bit too much of all of those were consumed every weekend from the first time my grandparents were in residence. 
All of this continued until the sale of the cottage when my parents decided it was time to move on to new adventures in 1983. 
It had always been a life-long dream of mine to someday buy back the old family cottage and so at least once a year we would drive out to look at the old place and see how it had changed. And while over the years, the front steps disappeared, the original sign came off, and the paint changed colors, the cottage itself still stood like an old sentinel at the top of the hill on Central ave, calling to me year after year to remember what mattered, and someday come back to it. 
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It took the death of my father in 2019, for me to answer that call. My dad Dan, as he was known to most, and Danny as he was called by my grandmother was my family's larger-than-life leader who in many ways was the glue in the family. It wasn't that he was warm and fuzzy and by that means drew us all together. In fact, it was much the opposite. "Get along with your sister" would be issued as a command, rather than any Dr. Phil emotional approach to family reconciliation. And "show up on Sunday, your mom is making supper" was not to be ignored. 
Of course, under this tough exterior was a man with a very caring heart, and so, by the time my own children knew him as grandpa, he had mellowed to the point where he was utterly idolized and adored by them, and seen by all as Captain Dan, fixer of any problem, driver of large fire trucks and huge boats and softy towards all pets and children. 
My parents by then owned a large 46' trawler called the Thunderbird that had in some ways acted as a substitute for Banchory Lodge for them. (As I said, my dad loved anything BIG). It was large enough to take out a party of people on the lake for the afternoon, and my mother's "room for one more" attitude, had many people spend a night onboard. ​ ​
 We also rented a vacation cottage for a few years nearby, but our family never did come together again under one roof in quite the same way as we had back at the family cottage. And as the family expanded to include my sons Dayne and Blake, daughter-in-laws, Mel and Jessica, adopted daughter Grace, grandson Liam, and two nephews (Alex and Matthew) we only visited together in large gatherings a couple of times a year.
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Then came 2019 and a year of family woes, followed in 2020 by a worldwide pandemic. When real trouble comes, it makes everything else seem completely unimportant. This was the case for my entire family when over a period of a couple of weeks my sister Tracy Elizabeth was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my Dad passed away suddenly from a heart attack. As a family, we felt gutted by our dad's unexpected death, but barely able to grieve as we surrounded my sister with support, and attempted to help her knock off every item on her bucket list. Her last year was filled with travel, and any experience we could deliver that she wanted. My brother Jim and cousin Denis even took her cliff diving (at her insistence) three months before her death. Yet despite of all this, that final year of her life is remembered as us bravely attempting to hold onto family life together while watching it pour through our hands as quickly as the sand of our childhood memories.
And it was during that last year of her life that my sister talked to me about her legacy, and of course, our conversation came back around to Banchory Lodge, and the many memories created there by the generations of our family. She confided in me that she was concerned about our mom being on her own  and suggested to me that if ever I was to pursue my dream of a cottage, now would be the time. Her suggestion however brought up a rather unresolvable dilemma, as our family cottage was located on the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and my mom and dad had bought a small retirement-sized home on the West side of the lake. Oh, and there was also the major issue that the former family cottage, was not even actually for sale. 
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So I put the thought behind me, and if fate had not intervened that would have been the end of it. After all, it wasn't like I could move Banchory Lodge across the lake. However as is the case with most wonderful things that happen in life, there is nothing you can do to purposely make them happen, but if you simply let go, and trust in the ways of God and the universe, the most amazing things do come about, and right at the perfect time that they are needed. ​
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And so it happened that on the spur of the moment in May of 2020, we agreed to go out for a drive with some friends Russ and Brenda for a hot dog, at "Skinner's Restaurant" due to the boredom that had kicked in with the pandemic and the very limited opportunities we had to leave the house. These friends were part of our tiny covid bubble which included our immediate family and so we found ourselves sitting along the river chatting with them and sharing our latest news. Russ and Brenda as it happened were looking for a lake cottage close to where my mom had retired in Winnipeg Beach. 
Brenda went on to share that her Grandparents had had a lakefront cottage similar in some ways to the one I grew up at in Grand Beach, and she began to tell me of all the fond memories from her childhood there. She went on to say that her grandparent's cottage had been torn down, but they were on the search for a 4 season cottage that could eventually be a retirement home for them and a place to visit with their American grandchildren. Brenda concluded her story with... "Oh, and there was this one cottage, that was totally vintage" and she went on to describe a cottage that sounded so similar to Banchory Lodge, that I was pulled down memory lane with everything she said. "It's over a hundred years old, and it's right near the lake, and it's never been remodeled, and Wendy I couldn't help but think of you and Murray and how good you are at renovating." and we all laughed.....
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And two days later, we bought that cottage! ​

Thanks for reading. This blog will be a place where I will chronicle the physical restoration of our 110-year-old Cottage which after consultation with my mom, and permission from my aunty Lorna will be re-named "Banchory Lodge" in honor of our family legacy, and in search of the special magic that the Mailey's  knew how to create. We want of course to hand that legacy down to our children and grandchildren, but we also want to let them the hear story of where that legacy came from. So each of my posts will talk about the past and the present. I want to share some of the family and friends stories and memories from the Banchory Lodge and also invite you to watch the complete restoration of a 110-year-old original lake house, as we work our special kind of renovation love and style into its future as Banchory Lodge 2.0
So if you are reading this, and you have a memory, a photo, or any other record you can share with me about the original Banchory Lodge in Grand Beach, I would love for you to share your thoughts in the comments, or send me your photos and memories to: dwiadmin@me.com

​Watch for my next blog post where I will share photos and details of the "new" Banchory Lodge as we found it on the day we purchased it. 


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