The Builder Special: Why Your Brand-New Closet Is Mostly Empty Air
One wire shelf and a rod, seven feet up, with about 43 cubic feet of nothing underneath. What the builder left out of your new-build closet, and what fits in the same eight feet.
LAKESIDE STORAGE · KAWARTHA LAKES, ON
Custom Cabinets and Storage for the Kawartha Lakes
The Kawarthas are the flattest and the most year-round of the cottage regions we cover. Lindsay is 1 hour 31 minutes from the workshop at 73 Saunders Rd in Barrie, and Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls sit a little past it on the Trent-Severn. The defining pattern here is not the lake. It is how many 1960s cottages are being turned into houses people live in.
Serving the Kawartha Lakes
OUR WORK
Storage Built for Kawartha Lakes
Closets, mudrooms and boathouse storage are the parts of a cottage nobody planned. The house got a great room and a dock, and the gear ended up in piles by the side door. We build to your measurements, install with our own employees rather than subcontractors, and back the whole system with our Homeowners Lifetime Warranty.
THE REAL JOB
What Storage Has to Do in Kawartha Lakes
The Kawarthas are the flattest and the most year-round of the cottage regions we cover. Lindsay is 1 hour 31 minutes from the workshop at 73 Saunders Rd in Barrie, and Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls sit a little past it on the Trent-Severn. The defining pattern here is not the lake. It is how many 1960s cottages are being turned into houses people live in.
Winterised cottages are a storage problem of their own
A cottage built in 1968 for July weekends has almost no built-in storage, because it never needed any. Insulate it, put in a furnace and move in full time, and suddenly there is nowhere for winter coats, vacuum cleaners, or the things you used to leave in town. Most of our Kawartha work is that conversion, and it is closets and a mudroom before it is anything else.
Trent-Severn boating gear does not shrink in winter
Sturgeon, Pigeon, Balsam and Cameron all feed the same lock system, and boating here runs bigger and longer than on the small Muskoka lakes. Fenders, lines, skis and a spare prop take real linear feet. On a year-round property that gear has to be stored somewhere it is out of the way for six months without being buried.
Bungalows and low ceilings need a different plan
A lot of Kawartha stock is single-storey with eight-foot ceilings, which is less generous than the cathedral-ceiling cottage everyone pictures. You cannot solve that with height alone. It usually means drawers rather than deep shelves, because a deep low shelf turns into a place things go to be forgotten, and pull-outs so the back of a cabinet is reachable.
WHY DREAM SPACES
Why Kawartha Lakes Homeowners Choose Dream Spaces
Most storage sold into the Kawarthas is a stock closet kit sized for a modern subdivision bedroom, and a lot of houses here started life as 1960s cottages. Eight-foot ceilings, shallow openings and almost nothing built in. We design for the building you have rather than the one the catalogue was drawn for. DRIVE LINE: Our designer meets you at the house with the finish samples, so you see them in the light of the room they are going into. Lindsay is 1 hour 31 minutes from the shop, with Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls a little past it. MATERIAL HEADING: Built for a Converted Cottage MATERIAL BODY: A winterised cottage moves more than a house does, because it was framed for summer and now runs a furnace. We allow for that in how the runs are fixed and scribed, so a cabinet fitted in February still closes properly in July.
A Designer Comes to You
Our designer meets you at the house with the finish samples, so you see them in the light of the room they are going into. Lindsay is 1 hour 31 minutes from the shop, with Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls a little past it. MATERIAL HEADING: Built for a Converted Cottage MATERIAL BODY: A winterised cottage moves more than a house does, because it was framed for summer and now runs a furnace. We allow for that in how the runs are fixed and scribed, so a cabinet fitted in February still closes properly in July.
Built for Two Seasons
Half your gear is dormant six months of the year. We plan the dormant half onto deep shelves and into lidded bins, and keep the in-season half at eye level where you can reach it without moving anything else first.
Built for a Converted Cottage
A winterised cottage moves more than a house does, because it was framed for summer and now runs a furnace. We allow for that in how the runs are fixed and scribed, so a cabinet fitted in February still closes properly in July.
Homeowners Lifetime Warranty
For as long as you own the house. That matters more on a place you plan to hand to your kids than on one you expect to sell in five years.
SERVICES
What We Build in Kawartha Lakes
Below is the full range. In the Kawarthas most of it is closets and mudrooms in winterised cottages, plus garage walls for boating gear. We count what has to fit before drawing any of it.
HOW IT WORKS
Our Process
One team handles the job from the first measure to the last screw. Up here that matters, because we are not coordinating a subcontractor you have never met into a house you are not living in. Your designer brings the samples to you, and we deliver the flat-packed cabinetry ourselves rather than leaving you to haul it up Highway 11.
01
Consultation
We come to the house, or do it over video if you are in the city and the cottage is not. We walk the rooms, open the closets that are not working, and count what has to go back into them.
02
Custom Design
You get a rendering of the actual room at its actual dimensions. If a boathouse or a bunkie is in scope, we flag the material change here in writing, before you approve anything.
03
Professional Installation
Our own employees install it. We protect the floors, and most installs finish inside a day, so a Friday arrival does not become a weekend of noise.
04
Enjoy Your New Space
We walk it with you and load the first season in together, so you can see whether the shelf heights are right while we are still standing there.
More on Closets
Kids’ Closets That Still Work in Five Years
The closet you build for a four-year-old is wrong by nine and faintly humiliating by fourteen. Eight decisions that let a kids’ closet change with the child.
How to Read a Custom Closet Quote in Ontario
Two quotes for the same closet can land thousands apart. What drives the number, and the three construction questions that make any two quotes comparable.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Kawartha Lakes Storage, Answered
Do you cover Lindsay and Bobcaygeon?
Lindsay is 1 hour 31 minutes from 73 Saunders Rd in Barrie. Bobcaygeon and Fenelon Falls are a little further and still a normal working day. Past Buckhorn it starts to stretch, and we will say so rather than take the job and be late.
We are converting a cottage to year-round. Where do we start?
The entry and the primary bedroom, in that order. A house you live in through a Kawartha winter runs its side door constantly, so a bench, boot storage and hooks pay back immediately. The bedroom is next because a 1960s cottage closet is usually one rod in a shallow opening.
Our ceilings are only eight feet. Does that limit what you can build?
It changes the design rather than limiting it. Full-height cabinets to the ceiling still beat a dresser with dead air above it, and we lean harder on drawers and pull-outs so nothing is lost at the back of a deep low shelf. What we avoid is stacked upper boxes you would need a step to reach every day.
What does a Kawartha Lakes project cost?
Reach-in closets run $2,500 to $6,000 and a walk-in $4,000 to $10,000. A large walk-in or dressing room is $10,000 to $20,000, and painted full-custom work runs $20,000 to $40,000 and up. We quote from a measured design rather than a bracket.
Start Your Kawartha Lakes Storage Project
Closets, mudrooms and garage storage across the Kawarthas all start from the same two questions: what has to fit, and where is it living now. Call 705-315-9169 or book a consultation. We also build across cottage country in Muskoka, and the full list of towns is on our Ontario service areas page.
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