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 • How you can read, watch, stream, listen, and visit—Cottage Life is everywhere

Contributors

Cottage Life

Editor’s Note: Behold! There are secrets in the soil

Your Letters: What’s the gibber-jabber?

Waterfront • Pack it up, pack it in. No, wait. Fall still brings fun cottage times. (Let us begin!)

Highways might be good for turtles?

Reporter: Tire talk, deck device & cash for creatures

More useful signs we’d like to see on our cottage commute • Signage for speed limits and slippery bridges and men “at work” are all well and good. But these imaginary signs? Far more useful during a cottage commute.

Cottage Life’s inagural Waterfowl Awards

A cottager group’s Indigenous community garden project

We asked on social media: are you an island cottager?

A fishing derby just for the kids

Recipe: Oven-roasted wild mushrooms

How a simple letter closed a competitive cottage sale

Workshop

DIY tabletop hockey game

How to sharpen blender blades

Skylights too much work? Try an artificial one

How much weight you can safely hang from ceiling joists

An easier way to feed a wire through a tight space • Feeding wire through a convoluted conduit or a wall cavity?

Keep your septic cozy this winter with a septic blanket

A superior roof de-icing system

Troubleshoot your thermocouple

Cottage Q&A: Drinking lake water; trapdoor snail invasion; bitten raft mystery; stained boat seats; bird box clean-out

Help! My friend’s cottage I’m staying at is a mess • Borrowing the cottage from a pal can lead to an etiquette minefield—and a whole mess of conflict, warns Zim

This family’s contemporary treehouse is stylish and kind to the forest • Far removed from a rickety, childhood treehouse, this family’s contemporary cabin is stylish and kind to the forest

Our field guide to the peculiar and extraordinary world of fungi • Foraging for mushrooms is like uncovering thousands of secrets in the soil.

Looking for more light? A skylight may be the solution • Got a dark cavern of a cottage? Do you want more natural light? A skylight may be the solution—they’re more efficient and less leak-prone than ever

These parents let their teens take the lead on a fishing camp reno • These parents let their teens take the lead on a fishing camp reno. Here’s how they demoed and reno’d four cabins (and mastered those power tools)

The only thing that soothes the ache of closing up is the promise of spring • Closing up is hard, writes Paul Rush in this essay from our archives. But it’s an ache that’s soothed by the knowledge that the cottage will sit unchanged until spring returns once more

When October rolls around, the largetooth aspen outshines other trees in the woods • The fast-growing largetooth aspen may not stand tall for long, but its root system is a hotspot for new growth

The charming name for the cutest little boat on the lake