Labour of Love | Redstone Lake Home: Part 1
Everyone dreams of owning their own home for their family, which is becoming harder and harder with this market! But imagine being able to design and build the home of your dreams from the ground up. That’s exactly what my parents did the summer of 1999 when they built our family cottage. My dad went up to Redstone Lake with a friend for a little weekend getaway, and completely fell in love with the area. Not too long later, my parents had purchased land on the same lake and were knee deep in creating their dream home.
Countless hours of designing and review, followed by more hours meeting with the architects and builders, construction was well under way. We used to make the almost three hour drive back and forth from the property every Saturday morning to view the week’s progress. We would have a packed picnic that we would enjoy sitting on the rocks on the shore, or right in the middle of the house construction. My brothers and I would explore the shore and the construction of the house with our trusty dog by our side. This is how my family spent the whole summer and well into the fall of 1999, and by Christmas Eve we were ready to move in.
There wasn’t a whole lot to actually move in though, since the only furniture we had for the house at the time was a bunch of mattresses. The rest of our furniture was scheduled for delivery later that week. But this is when one of my favourite childhood stories that I love to tell people happened: the first time I outsmarted my brother with logic! Our first night in the house we were divvying up the single mattresses between my brothers and I, but there was an extra one. My older brother Kevin decided that since he was the oldest, he was therefore entitled to the extra mattresses. But with my amazing logic skills, I explained to him that the extra mattresses actually belonged to me because I was getting a bunk bed in my room. Which really meant that the extra mattresses would be living in my room long term, so I should get two mattresses the first night while sleeping on the floor. And I won! It was definitely one of the highlights of my Christmas that year.
We also rang in the new millennium at our new house that year, with all my cousins in tow. I can remember decorating the mantel with a giant paper sign I made with my cousins, all of us acting out a little skit about the fear everyone had about losing all power, launching fireworks out over the lake, and staying up late together. There were many Christmases and New Years spent together as a family in our secluded country home.
After building a not so modest house in the country, the budget for the furniture was not nearly as extravagant. But slowly over time, I’ve assisted with redesigning the interior of the home so that it matches the beauty of the house itself and the secluded natural surroundings. Stay tuned for the room-by-room transformations that I’ve done over the past 16 years. Every house has a story that makes it a home, and this is ours.
allison has always been in love with interior design. from an early age she has been fascinated with the impact that design has on our everyday living environment, and has the rare ability to walk into a space and visualize it at its full potential. allison believes that interior design is an art form that takes the ordinary to extraordinary, and strives to achieve practical solutions that are both beautiful and elegant.