Crafts & Fun

Ahhh, cottage life. you can’t call yourself a self-respecting Canuck unless you’ve dripped across a wooden porch in a wet bathing suit, accidentally slammed the finicky screen door and turned your goose-pimpled backside against a crackling hearth. And it’s been proven, trust me, that a jigsaw puzzle is always more fun done on a creaky card table, with nothing but the hoots of late-eve skinnydippers as background sound.

Life by the water is iconic — for a reason. Many of our best childhood memories revolve around the sun-kissed summer days we spent boating, swimming, fishing or lazing on the dock at a cottage — whether our own, a friend’s or a relative’s. It may have been no more than an hour’s drive from the city, but it was a universe away from concrete, skyscrapers and traffic.

Who wouldn’t want to offer this experience to his kids? Well, yeah, but what about the expense, the maintenance, the septic system? Here’s the thing: To own can be onerous, to rent is divine.

Every year, Jim Prosser of Ajax, Ontario, rents a cottage so he and wife Masi, 14-year-old twin daughters, Kim and Jill, and chocolate lab, Ozzie, can run away to the lake for a few weeks. Prosser actually shares ownership of a family cottage in the Kawarthas. But because he’s the oldest in his family and ends up arbitrating cottage-related disagreements — like who gets which weeks — he’s decided to rent in the Haliburton area. “The affordability factor when you compare Muskoka to Haliburton is night and day,” he says. “The property we’re renting this year, which is $1,400 a week, would probably be $3,000 or $4,000 in Muskoka.”

Ouch! If that seems outrageous, remember Muskoka is probably the hottest cottage market in Canada. “This area is to cottaging as Whistler is to skiing,” says Andrew Wagner-Chazalon, editor of the weekly newspaper The Muskokan. That cachet costs, since rental fees tend to follow real estate values. Sprawling Muskoka cottages may sell for anywhere from $400,000 to several million, depending on amenities and location, and may rent for thousands a week — as can exclusive, secluded spots along Vancouver Island and on BC’s Gulf Islands. In the economical Maritimes and Prairies, where cottages can sell for anywhere from $35,000 to $300,000, you can rent for as little as $500 or as much as $1,500 weekly.

Calgarians Susan and Francis Pilley pay $600 a week for the cottage they’ve rented every summer for the past six years. They go to Grand Beach, Manitoba, about an hour’s drive north of Winnipeg, with their three sons — 18-year-old Rob, 14-year-old Brian, and Ben, 11. It’s not waterfront, but is just a few minutes walking distance to the water and Francis’s sister has a place nearby.

“You can see all your relatives and still have a holiday,” says Susan. “It’s terrific for pulling it together as a family, especially these days with computers and TVs and video games. We don’t have any of that there. We play cards every night. And Grand Beach is just the best. The beach is so nice, it’s the boys’ destination every day — that and Rosie’s Bakery for breakfast.”

Word of mouth remains one way to find a rental, but experienced renters say the Internet has made such searches much easier. BC cottage owner Jerry Killam now lives in New York and uses the Internet to rent his property on quiet, isolated Mayne Island for $900 a week. “I tried putting an ad in The Seattle Times and that generated almost nothing, and then I put an ad in Canoe and Kayak magazine and that generated nothing,” he says. “So eventually I realized the Net was the way to go.”

Renters can also scan larger city newspapers, buy cottage rental directories (Tyler’s is the best known) and check classified ads in cottaging magazines.

But potential pickings through print are dwindling. “We’re not seeing a lot of ads placed for cottage rentals,” says Wagner-Chazalon. “If people want to rent their cottage, chances are they know somebody who wants to rent it, or they know somebody who knows somebody. Also, people renting out are more likely to go with one of the rental agencies — one of the services they provide is they help match the client to the cottage.”

Property management agencies are increasingly common; they generally take their charges out of rental fees, and forward the balance to the property owners. Prosser uses Haliburton-based WRD Cottage Rental Agency, renting places “sight unseen” out of the agency’s pool of about 150 cottages. Prosser knows the area and trusts agency owner Bill Dewey, whose properties range from $600 to $3,000 a week.

If Prosser didn’t have Dewey’s pre-inspected offerings, he would insist on personally checking out cottages in advance where possible, and would ask questions “about the neighbours, how big the properties are and what the frontage is like.”

Barb Stronach, executive assistant for the Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Association, rents out one of her family’s two cottages in Muskoka, and agrees renters need to ask the right questions. (See “But Are There Skunks in The Woodpile?” below.) “We encourage people, if they haven’t been there, to come up and look at it,” Stronach says. “Do your homework like you would with anything else. Look at pictures, talk to the family, go to the cottage and see it — not in the winter, in the spring and fall.”

Once you find a cottage that satisfies your requirements and price range, “it’s way better than hotelling,” says Susan Pilley. “You have your own home, your own space, kids can sleep in till noon and it doesn’t bother anybody else.”

What are you waiting for?

Originally published in Today's Parent, July 2003