Scott was thinking of things that would need eventual demo and that could go in the dumpster while we had it, and he noted the deck. His brother offered to help out today, and so he set to dismantling the deck.

Meanwhile, Scott finished digging the cistern hole, and the brothers got the cistern into the hole.

The next day, Scott got the deck moved to the dumpster and the wood pile moved to the edge of the property.

Scott has moved a lot of rocks.

At the end of the day, I was a little crestfallen looking around to see our accomplishments. It didn't look commensurate with the damage done to both our bodies. I guess it is also the phenomenon of not being able to keep an accurate "before" picture in mind when looking in real time at the "after."

First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean  insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.

Second, we finished gutting the bathroom and then removed all the wallboard from the walls and ceiling of the eventual kitchen. While Scott was working on the slab, I started taking the wallboard down after removing the trim and switch plates. Then he came in and did the bathroom, which included smashing a tile wall, a concrete shower pan, and a concrete floor four inches thick.

I don't have any good picture of the bathroom from the outside where you could see the 3-foot wall on the right where the tiled part of the shower was, the 2-foot wall on the right that housed the pocket door, or the pocket door. All I have are these which show the two walls but with no good idea of context or scale.

We kept the fire burning all day, and when we were exhausted and ready to go home, Scott loaded the last of the mattresses on the truck to put in the trash.

Scott and Thomas repaired the roof on the garage. A bigger job than Scott expected, but now it's nice and new.

In process

Another day Scott cleared brush from the river bank.

We were hanging with my BIL Dave and his girlfriend Elle. Elle was saying that her mother and stepfather owned a cottage on the Portage River, and they had gotten to the age where they had decided to sell it. My husband's ears perked up.

We went out to see it within days. Elle's sister Moe and her husband Matt have the house right next door, and they were doing the selling because they wanted to make sure the people who bought the cottage were not developers or AirBnb landlords etc. 

My husband fell in love instantly. The property is right on the river, and the cottage had been updated with a nice loft and sunroom. But many other items needed to be updated. I was uneasy about the musty smell, the evidence of rodents, the mosquitos, the hour drive from our home, the water situation (they had a cistern for toilets and showers but brought their drinking water in with them; if we moved there, we'd need a new cistern and to truck in water), the septic, while brand new, didn't function, and the garage was falling in. 

Plusses for me were the bald eagle's nest at the back of the property, the nature preserve across the river and another one just established on the property surrounding us, the neighbors Mo and Matt, and the fact that I knew Scott could fix anything and make it nice. Mostly, I could tell he wanted it really bad.  

So we bought it.

Exterior

Interior

More interior shots

The river view and the eagle's nest. In June 2024, there was a big storm, and the nest blew over.

There is a trail already, but they are going to make a bigger one eventually. In the time since we bought it, they put in a kayak launch next door and graveled the road leading to it.

We knew that the sunroom and the gabled loft were recent additions to the house. Later Scott learned that the kitchen and bathroom (front end of the house) were an earlier addition.
1. the earlier addition
2. the sunroom
3. the gable from the outside
4. the loft from the inside

Here are two photos. One is the front of the house before the loft addition. The other is the back or river side of the house before the sunroom addition. These photos were hanging on the walls when we took over ownership.

Comparison pics, back and front of house.