Homemade on Kapikog

STORY WALTER FRANCZYK
PHOTOGRAPHY SANDY MACKAY

Jeff and Jessica Horst Have no Hesitation about building anotHer lakeside cottage. “We Would love to,” says Jeff.

Jeff, a homebuilder, and his wife Jessica, an interior decorator, built their beautiful new three-bedroom cottage on the shore of Kapikog Lake in just five months. “I had a blast, a lot of fun,” Jeff says. “It went really well.”

Jessica, who fondly remembers summers at her family’s cottage on Eels Lake in the Kawarthas, had wanted a cottage for years. “It just gets in your blood,” she says. When she mentioned the idea to Jeff, they chose to avoid the lengthy Highway 401 drive from their home in Elmira to the Kawarthas and began looking in Muskoka for a place they could fix up. “It was hard to pick,” Jessica admits. “We have a lot of beautiful lakes in the surrounding area.”

Ultimately, in the fall of 2018, they bought an old cottage with a shallow sandy beach on Kapikog, a glacier-shaped lake amidst a semi-circular swirl of little lakes between Georgian Bay and Lake Joseph. “The drive wasn’t too bad and we really love the lake because it isn’t weedy,” says Jessica. “That was one of my criteria. I didn’t want a weedy lake, something a little smaller, but with a marina, something that wasn’t too busy.” A forested point shelters the 1.4-acre property from the west wind. The original cottage, built more than 50 years ago, was badly damaged by rodents and water. It wasn’t salvageable. They tore it down and started from scratch.

As owners of their own building company, JJH Building and Design, they were confident and capable of building their own lake house. Jeff has been building homes since age 17. As a team, he and Jessica have done renovations, built additions and constructed large, covered timber frame decks for a variety of clients. 

“We were on a time crunch and we really wanted to get it done in one summer,” says Jessica. “We didn’t want to stretch it out.” Jeff picked up a Beaver Homes & Cottages design book from Mar-Span Home Hardware Building Centre, where he sources a lot of building products. While flipping through the designs, a few plans kept jumping out at them. Keeping the existing architecture of their new lake neighbourhood in mind, they chose a design with a northern vibe that suits the lake and the landscape. “It was a jumping-off point, a place we could start,” says Jessica. They tweaked the plans, raising the great room ceiling to 17 feet and eliminating the walk-in closet in the primary bedroom to make the bathroom area larger.

With a year to plan, Jessica developed ideas for the interior. “I had time to collect things,” she says. Watching their budget, she sourced furnishings from various suppliers, including upholstery from Accents for Living, a Guelph home fashion and design store. “I even purchased used items and chalk-painted them.” Jeff did most of the construction, cutting his regular work week in southern Ontario to four days to toil on their cottage the other three days. “He pretty much worked seven days a week until the project was complete,” says Jessica. “It was a little crazy.”

They built their lake house with an open-concept living space and a high wall of windows overlooking the water. Clad in Jeff’s floor-to-ceiling stonework, an Opel wood-burning fireplace from Fireplace & Leisure Centre divides the great room from the dining area and kitchen. Wooden beams ascend the vaulted ceiling and cross overhead in the kitchen and dining room. Custom- milled poplar walls and ceilings are painted Benjamin Moore Simply White.

Trades and suppliers the Horsts have worked with for years helped them on this project. Quartz countertops from Graniteworx surround stainless steel appliances and overlay the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Edge Custom Cabinetry furnished glass door kitchen cabinetry. Brodrecht’s Flooring Canada supplied hexagonal backsplash tiles that Jeff installed. Reclaimed hemlock from Century Wood, finished with four coats of water-based sealer, covers floors in the main living area, halls and bedrooms. “Reclaimed wood is great for that because it’s already been through every kind of season you can think of,” says Jessica. Erb Electric performed over and above expectations to electrify the home.

The primary bedroom has its own walkout to a sitting area on the glass-sided deck that runs along the cottage front. Two other bedrooms are furnished with queen-size beds.

Outside, just steps from the dining room, Jeff built a stand-alone Muskoka room, enclosed by screened windows overlooking the lake and upland forest. Warmed by a wood- burning fireplace and furnished with a wooden dinner table that seats eight, it’s one of Jessica’s favourite spaces. “In the summer, you tend to grab your plate and head outside,” she says. “On chilly nights, you can put the screens down and still sit out there and have a fire as well.” Porch to Pier manufactured and installed the vinyl screens and windows for this room. “They were a nice company to deal with,” says Jessica.

Between the cottage and their dock, they created a firepit at the centre of a stone patio. At the lake shore, the couple built a tiny salt-box style bunkie furnished with twin bunk beds, a delightful spot for youngsters’ sleepovers.

The cottage great room, with plenty of space for family and friends, is one of the couple’s favourite spots. “It’s very bright, very comfortable and the fireplace is there. I like to hang out there,” Jeff says.

With sand and gravel supplied by Bev Keall Trucking, Jeff and Jessica landscaped the property. “It was a lot of work, but it was a fun project to do,” Jessica says. “We did a lot of the work ourselves. That’s what made it affordable,” she says. “If you do it all yourself, you don’t have to hire anyone.”

Some day, if they find another property, in the right place at the right price, they might just do it all again.