Our cottage was once a part of what was called the Brown Estate, which included the large home thru the woods towards
Somes Sound along the Fernald Cove shore, the cove just outside your living room. The big house is now the Kyles property. Our cottage was the "overflow" guest house. The home you see as you enter our small driveway to your right is the Hayes Cottage, and was originally the stable for the estate.

There are two other 'parcels' that belonged to the estate, one is the Hipkins log cabin on Fernald Point Road just past the entrance to Connor Point Lane, and the last is the new home just completed and hidden in the trees along the shore just past the Hipkins'.

Our cottage was initially just two nice rooms with their own roofs connected by the kitchen and bath. When we purchased it, we decided to enlarge it for our family of four, and we decided the best way to conserve what we had was to transform it to the "A"-Frame design you now see.

We simply joined the two roof lines East and West by following the existing roofs, and enclosed the area in between with a living room, and an upstairs bedroom with a second bath. There were two decks, one facing the water and the other the woods & drive. However, the deck facing the water was sustaining weather damage, so we are having that deck enclosed to preserve the unique wood and timbers we used to create the addition.

The timbers and floors in the expanded part of the cottage came from a distillery in Cincinnati, which was being taken down, and the lumber sold for just pennies per board foot. The beams are 2 1/2 X 8 or 10 or 12 inches wide, by ~20 ft long of southern yellow pine, an extremely hard and well seasoned wood. Some of the vertical supports are massive, and the floors and ceiling are 2X6 tongue-and-groove, as you can see as you go up the circular stairway.

We purchased the wood as the buildings were being torn down in Cincinnati, hauled them to our home there and spent weeks pulling out nails, until we had ~40,000 lb. of lumber, which we hauled up to the cottage with a flat bed truck.

We spent two years/summers building the addition, after having the foundation 'improved' from the original post supports. We used adjacent trees and block-and-tackle to hoist the beams in place; Father & Son (16). The support beams are bolted through, as it was impossible to drive nails through the 2 1/2 inch thickness of each beam. The main beams are three boards thick, and if you look carefully they only intersect the original structure in two places, which can only be detected inside the closets.

The metal supports were custom made by a blacksmith in Cincinnati, where we spend our winters.

While father and son assembled the support structure, the roof shingles were purchased in Oregon as pre-assembled shingled panels, 2 ft X 8 ft, which enabled us to put up the roof covering in a much shorter time. These were pre-coated with sealant by mother and daughter (12) by putting them through a trough which enabled a thorough coating of sealer and recovery of the excess for the next panel. A true family effort.

The final shingling and vertical shingles that you see were done by Norman Harkins Builders, to whom we owe a great deal of thanks, as we did not have time to finish the job before 'summer vacation' ended, returning to Cincinnati and work and school.

Now we have a nice living room facing the cove, two bedrooms downstairs, one of which we have converted to a TV room (DVD Movie room really, no real TV reception in the woods!) The second floor is a large bedroom and full bath. As mentioned, the deck facing the water is being enclosed to preserve the flooring, which also happens to be the ceiling for the living room. All the glass is either sliding doors, or double pane specially made for us in Cincinnati.

The furnishings were mostly brought from home, and it makes us feel very comfortable here. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Tom, Ginny Sean & Tiffany