1925 fishing cabin transformed into a home
Tim Carr and Cindy Bach remember the first time they saw the house that would become their Portage Lakes home. The floor in the original 1925 fishing cabin sagged as much as 2 1/2 inches in some places — if it remained at all. “When you opened up the front door and looked down, you saw the basement,” Bach recalls. Additions had created an odd layout that put a den and three-season room on the lower level.
“Nothing was square, nothing was level,” Carr says. “It was a mess.”
But Carr and Bach were unfazed. As the owners of Akron-based Lakefront Excavating, they were used to houses that needed a lot of work, and this one was located on approximately 90 feet of Turkeyfoot Channel. The location appealed to the couple — they had spent many summer days on the Portage Lakes in their pontoon boat.
Over the next nine months, they gutted the house and, with the help of Akron-based Shultz Design & Construction, transformed the dilapidated house into a three-bedroom, three-bath home with the space to comfortably host up to 100 guests in a post-COVID world.
The transformation began with Lakefront Excavating demolishing the three-season room. Shultz Design & Construction replaced it with an addition consisting of a first-floor great room and deck over a lower-level outdoor living room. The couple credits design coordinator Sarah Linerode with helping them settle on siding the house in a white vinyl lap with vinyl shake-shingle detailing at the waterfront gable peaks to begin creating the Northeast coastal cottage look they desired. Lakefront Excavating constructed barn stone walls to retain flagstone terraces built in the backyard. A sailboat converted into a bar table was docked on the upper terrace, while a gas fire pit fashioned from a drilled-out piece of sandstone was installed on the lower counterpart.
Inside, painters coated the kitchen, great room and dining area walls in Sherwin-Williams’ Sandbar, a pale tan that sets off white quartz-topped cabinetry and a weathered marble-tile backsplash. “The mortaring really mimics rope,” Linerode notes. Carr suggested painting the island in Benjamin Moore’s slate-blue Van Deusen hue.
“[I] didn’t want everything to look like a hospital,” he quips.
A walnut range-hood shroud and floating shelves provide a visual link to luxury vinyl plank flooring and a great room fireplace faced in hardwood from a remaining section of the original cabin floor.
“[Cindy] wanted some material that was original to the home just to pay homage to whatever was there before,” Linerode says. “And they really liked that look of the reclaimed material.”
She helped Bach select the space’s light-taupe microsuede sectional, hammered-metal coffee table and navy-leather club chair. The rug, an abstract pattern in slate blue, gray, taupe and ivory, is representative of Bach’s eclectic tastes.
“A lot of the details and elements are more natural,” Linerode says. “But she blends a lot of different styles in here.”
Linerode suggested installing a transom window salvaged from the original kitchen in the wall between the dining area and home office to bring additional light into their workspace from the open living/dining area. The live-edge wood-topped dining table typically seats eight in blue-linen nail-head-trimmed chairs. But the couple can accommodate up to 20 for dinner by utilizing ivory microsuede chairs at the copper-topped kitchen table, wood-and-metal seats at the island and wood stools at the peninsula.
The house has proved well suited to Carr and Bach’s everyday lifestyle. They talk of meals prepared on the grill and eaten at a high-top cafe table on the deck, of evenings passed in Adirondack chairs by the fire pit. Entertaining is casual and often impromptu. They watch football games in the outdoor living room long after summer has turned into fall.
“Right up until the point that Cindy has to put her gloves and hat and mittens on,” Carr says, “we’re outside.”
Closer Look:
The most distinctive feature in Tim Carr and Cindy Bach’s backyard is a terrace bar table made from a 1956 Lippincott Comet sailboat the previous owner had managed to refinish. The couple removed the mast and boom from the 16-foot vessel — they used the former to make a newel post and the latter to craft a handrail for the staircase from the house’s first floor to its lower level — and drilled holes in the hull so rainwater could drain through it. A carpenter friend made a bar top to cover the cockpit, then mounted the boat on 6-inch-by-6-inch wooden posts.
“The thing we really liked about that sailboat was the top of it was flat,” Carr says.
“A lot of the boats are curved [or] humped. They would not make a very good bar.”