Woods Cottage: Caring for a Home in the Forest

If you're fortunate enough to live in a wooded setting, your home maintenance chores can be quite different from the average suburban home owner. There can be issues with mold on the roof and in the interior when little sunshine makes it through the tall trees. The woodland setting can be delightful with regular viewing of wildlife, but having chipmunks in the walls is no joke. Here are tips for dealing with some of the maintenance requirements of a home in the woods.

If the home is only occupied in the summer, then additional care must be taken to properly store everything and prevent freeze damage in cold climates.

(photo by Virginia Allain)

Need some tips for getting moss off your roof? Here are some videos to show you how.

We have one of these and it's great for cleaning your deck of mold or power washing your siding or the roof.

I'm pretty casual about cleaning during the summer when we are in our cottage. It's deep in the woods and is a marvelous retreat from the world. Towering pine trees and maple trees shade our lot and keep it delightfully cool except for the hottest days.

Those huge fir trees shed pine needles which we track into the cottage. Every so often I sweep those out and feel virtuous about cleaning the house. It's not really house cleaning though and I know it. Therefore, when a visitor is expected, I have to bestir myself and do some real honest-to-goodness house cleaning.

A friend from Missouri flies in tomorrow. This set me off on a belated spring cleaning. I doubt that he will notice that the windowsills are free of dust or that the mold spots are gone from the mini-blinds. I'll know and I'm glad I finally took care of those.

Now I can relapse into my usual slothful summer ways. I putter in the garden, read books, write on the computer and play golf. Clean the house? Not until another guest is expected.

Tell me about your cleaning habits... are you super neat or somewhat sloppy?

Over the winter months, a closed vacation cottage in the woods becomes dusty. The humidty interacts with the dust and when the cottage is opened in the spring, there is often mold on the mini-blinds. This video shows a simple way to clean them fast. My neighbor used this method and said it worked great.

I tried cleaning with bleach and cotton rags each slat of the mini-blind while it was in place on the window. Very laborious.

Get a good supply of tarps in different sizes and some rope. Save these for use year-after-year. Group together deck furniture and cover it with a tarp. Tie it so the tarp won't blow off during winter storms. Use the tarps to cover canoes and kayaks. Again tie everything down securely.