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Home & Garden Articles
Closing the Cottage For the Winter
Wed 30 Sep 2009 - 12:01
Closing the Cottage For the Winter
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Samual_M._Adams]Samual M. Adams
It's time to put on the boat cover and the Seadoo cover and generally get the cottage ready for the winter. For us a part of cottage life is closing the cottage. I likely won't totally close up the cottage until after Thanksgiving weekend but I like to get a jump start on some of the chores in the latter part of September. It's always sad to close the cottage but I actually enjoy the cottage closing chores as I know I can look forward to opening a clean cottage the next year.
Once the days become too chilly to enjoy our personal watercraft, I start to take them out. I take out the least popular or least used first. As I take each out of the water, I take the time to give it a good cleaning and make any minor repairs. Sometimes I need to sand and re-varnish paddles while other times the canoe or peddle boat might need a small fiberglass patch.
Once the PWCs are cleaned and repaired, I move them to their designated winter storage area and make sure they are securely covered for winter. Some watercraft have a special cover, for example my Seadoo PWC has a special Seadoo cover. Others are covered by durable tarps that I can fasten with bungee cords or ropes. All accessories such as paddles are stored in the rafters of the boathouse.
Another job that I enjoy is finding and splitting deadwood. We don't use a lot of firewood to heat the cottage but we do have a wood stove and the first few weekends of the cottage season (just after Easter) can be chilly. It's nice to open up the cottage and have some ready wood to throw into the wood stove. We don't often come up during the winter but if we do the wood is ready.
I also link to chop back any perennials we have like hosta and flowering phlox. At the cottage we have what could be referred to as a English style wild flower garden. It doesn't take much care and tends to self seed. However, if the large hosta leaves are allowed to lay on the ground over winter they make great bedrooms for slugs and other undesirables. By getting rid of the hosta leaves in the autumn the garden will be ready to re-sprout in the spring.
There are a number of other chores that need to be taken care of in the fall including turning off the water and draining the toilets but I will leave those chores to another article. I am going to enjoy that last parts of this years cottage life and go to try to find the [http://cottage--life.blogspot.com/2009/09/seadoo-covers.html]Seadoo covers.
Samual M. Adams writes a cooking column in his home town paper and is an avid DIYer. He and his family spend their summers at their cottage in southern Quebec. More of his articles can be found at http://cottage--life.blogspot.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samual_M._Adams http://EzineArticles.com/?Closing-the-Cottage-For-the-Winter&id=2958066
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