Photo date: February 11, 2024. See header image archive.

Welcome to Cottage on High Bluff Road

Hey. Thanks for checking out this cottage build blog.

On August 5, 2022 my wife and I closed on a 5-acre lot in Door County, Wisconsin. We're building a cottage on it. This site will document our progress.

This journal is going to be super casual, and sometimes veer off on weird tangents, but here, broadly, is the rationale for the site, and the type of content to expect.

  • Selfishly, dack.com/cottage is primarily for me, Dack, as a place to document our cottage build progress. But even more important than documenting it as it happens is documenting the information I'll gather along the way *before* the build, so I can refer to it when we're actually in the middle of having to make decisions. The web is a great medium for this. Additionally, by writing about it, upon review it will either validate or challenge my current thinking, and I like that.
  • A close second is that sharing our experience can hopefully help a fellow owner-builder on their journey. We're sure to make 1000 mistakes. With the benefit of reading this blog, perhaps someone can make just 900. That alone is worth me publishing this site.
  • It would be great if the forthcoming posts opened a conversation with some of the folks I'll cite, and the manufacturers of products we'll use, to add to the depth of content. Links get people's attention. I've spent enough time on the web to know not to invest effort on moderating comments, so that is not a feature here. But I would love to hear from you the old fashioned way: dack@dack.com. Please don't hesitate to drop me a line.
  • Finally, I get to create a logo. (More on this in a future post.)

I imagine the list of topics essentially following the build process. At the beginning there will be a lot of lot clearing, lumberdacking (not a typo), milling, site planning, terrain drawings, and architecture.

Then we'll get into the actual build and cover foundations, wells, septic, timber framing, SIPs, WRBs, stonework, roofs, windows, doors, and PV.

As the structure gets enclosed it will shift to framing, electrical, plumbing, cladding, flooring, furniture, cabinets, fireplaces, and interior design.

I am surely missing a bunch of things — not to mention the weird tangents — but this is roughly what you can expect along the way.

Thanks again for coming. I hope you find it sometimes useful, and sometimes entertaining.