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P L A N B E E

By Ann Vanderhoof

The sweet and magical story of what happens when someone says “Honey, could we?”

Photography Angus Rowe MacPherson

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warned Janice and Michael Laprade that the log cabin on Island 101G, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River, needed a little work. “He was an opti-mist,” says Michael.

“We expected it would have been given at least a lick and a promise when it was put on the market,” adds Janice. In fact, when the California couple arrived at the third-of-an-acre island—right in the International Rift, the narrow channel that separates Hill Island and Wellesley Island—they discovered food, both in the fridge and in pots on the stove, left when the previous owners departed 20 years earlier and now fossilized into unidenti-fiable black lumps. The cabin had no run-ning water or electricity. It was festooned with spiderwebs, mice nested in mat-tresses on rusted bed frames, and broken beer bottles filled the fireplace. The logs, black from neglect, were hidden behind cheesy turquoise fibreboard walls that had been home to several generations of squirrels (and their acorns).

Of course, the Laprades immediately made an offer. The two of their five kids who were with them—who had chanted “Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!” during the eight-minute boat ride from Ivy Lea—thought their parents had lost it. “The place was a dump,” says daughter Cassie, now 27. “And it smelled awful.”

“In spite of it being a tip, we looked at each other and said, ‘How many hand-adzed log cabins are there?’ ” Janice explains. “It was an opportunity to take something sweet and bring it back to what it was.” Her relaxed, sunny manner makes it instantly clear that she’s as much of a glass-half-full person as her spouse of 30 years. He finishes the thought: “Both of us saw in our mind’s eye what it could be.”

Their first purchase, after they had an underwater power cable run to their new island, was a Shop-Vac, and the first local they got to know by name was Donald, the guy at the Lans-downe landfill. During the summer of 2002, the first they spent on the island, they gutted the original early-1900s one-room log cabin, as well as the kitchen, second storey, and porch added by various owners over the years. They carted more than 100 contractor-sized garbage bags from cabin to dock to runabout to car to Donald.

“Friends would ask, ‘What are you doing for your holidays?’ ” says Janice. “I’d tell them, ‘I’m slaving uphill from dawn to dusk and then jumping in the river.’” That is, until it got too cold. Then she switched to their “hot-water system”—a kettle and a hot plate set up in the jury-rigged kitchen under a tarp on the deck. “I’d stand in the Rubbermaid dish bin and pour water from the kettle over my head. How undignified.”

You’ve come a long way, baby. Twelve years later, the place is a charmer. The logs glow, and the Adirondack-style decor feels right for a former hunting and fishing cabin. The win-dows and the doors have been replaced with modern, weather-tight ones, but their look echoes the originals. The makeshift kitchen has given way to granite-topped counters that pick up the texture and colour of the fireplace stone, plus a first-rate water-purification system (their treated river water, Michael boasts, tests better than bottled), a fridge with an icemaker, and a dishwasher. Upstairs, the flat ceiling has been removed, and the two bedrooms are open to a red-cedar-lined peaked roof. To provide extra sleeping space, cozy “captain’s bunks” have been built under the eaves, in what was formerly dead

Impulsiveness mixed with persistence helped Janice Laprade, above, find the live-edge siding for the screened porch where granddaughter Kayla plays. The fireplace’s birch posts and hand-forged doors, and a whale vertebra on the mantel, are Laprade embellishments, as is the surfboard bench, previous pages. That’s Michael on the left.

THE REAL ESTATE AGENT

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who was part of the show, “until I was pregnant with Cassie and got too big to fit in the box.” A tangible reminder of their illusionist background sits in a glass case in the cabin’s main room: a chunk of foundation they scavenged from the ruins of the Hollywood Hills estate where Houdini once lived.

Though he occasionally stuffs his pockets with tricks and does “walk-arounds” at charity events in the area, Michael is retired from the magic biz too. But there’s still magic on the island, in the way he and Janice, also 64, work together. “We have a brilliant partner-ship,” she says. (Janice was a dental hygienist before she retired, and the two met when she cleaned his daughter’s teeth.) Ask about one of the cabin’s smart upgrades or stylish touches—the wall sconces made with old snowshoes, say, or the fireplace doors with ironwork birch branches—and odds are it started with Janice saying something like “Honey, look at this” or “Honey, do you think we could do that?”

“We’re shameless copiers,” he says. Janice disagrees: “I prefer to think of us as ‘flatterers.’ ” She finds a visual to spring from—perhaps in a magazine, or online, or somewhere in their travels—and Michael takes it from there. If he doesn’t already know how to complete the project, he either figures it out or asks somebody. “Or 10 somebodies,” Janice says. He taught himself to black-smith, for instance—with help from a third-generation forgeron in Brittany—so he could make the iron bits they wanted for the cabin: hinges for the front door, nails and support plates, a Juliet balcony off their bedroom, the fireplace doors, brackets for hanging flower bas-kets on the dock, and a light fixture over the dining room table.

The snowshoe sconces grew from a photo in one of Janice’s magazines; the birch-log fireplace trim and a bedside lamp with a birch base resulted from a “Honey, do you think we could…” moment after a tree came

space above the first storey. But what really impresses is that the couple did all the work themselves, peeling the 1,300 sq. ft. cottage back to its bare bones and starting afresh.

“Our budget goes to materials,” explains Michael. “We’re the labour. We wouldn’t have this unless we did it ourselves.”

“And doing it yourself, you have the time to think things through and decide what really works,” says Janice. “You don’t have a contractor pressuring you to make decisions.”

“The flip side,” Michael says with a grin, “is that she has to live with yelling at her contractor, ‘When is that toilet going to be installed?’”

Given that the couple also built their home on the California coast themselves—a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome—you expect to learn that 64-year-old Michael, who’s originally from Montreal, worked in a building trade before he retired. “I spent 30 years in prison,” he says. He lets you imagine his crimes for a beat or two, then adds, “…administration.”

Perhaps Michael’s hobby comes closer to explaining the island’s transformation: He’s a magician, a specialist in large stage illusions. At the height of his, uh, powers, he worked with 2½ tons of equipment in a theatre built especially for his show. Making doves appear out of nowhere was one of his specialties. “He did eight doves at once, which is quite rare,” says Janice, { Continued on page 93 }

Swimmers may need passports on Honey Bee: The Canada-US border is just a short distance from the dock, opposite. The cottage with the hand-cut, squared logs has a checkered past— during Prohibition it was a speakeasy for Americans and, later, it became a local hot spot for partiers. The tiny island is much quieter now.

“WE HAVE REAL FAIRIES ON OUR ISLAND”

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maps, “had all the charm and romance of a Howard Johnson’s,” Michael says. So they applied to the Ontario Geographic Names Board to have it renamed what locals had called it for decades: “Honey Bee Island,” thanks to owners who had an infestation in the ’40s or ’50s. “The rules are quite specific,” he explains. “It can’t be named after a living person, it can’t be offensive or have other connota-tions, and—most important—there has to be evidence that the name was used locally. We were able to show that the island was known as ‘Honey Bee’ to area tradesmen and marinas.” The change took three years to complete.

When the Laprades asked previous owners about the island’s past, they discovered the raison d’être of the heavy, tin-lined oak ice chest, 4½ feet long and three feet high, tucked under the stairs. Though the island is in Canadian waters, the border is just 30 feet from their dock, which made Honey Bee a convenient speakeasy for thirsty Americans during Prohibition. “The narrow tour boats would pull up to the old dock”—when the sun is just right and the river is calm,

backs breaking the view,” Janice says.) The six chairs opposite “look like some-thing Grandpa knocked together in his Adirondack backyard. No two are exactly alike.” Janice had spotted similar ones in a nearby resort, sourced them online, and discovered they were beyond the “baby budget.” Until sawyer John intro-duced the couple to another woodworker, Mark. “Finding and employing local artisans is a happy story,” Janice says.

In fact, finding the island itself was as happily fortuitous as their discovery of the Adirondack siding. The Laprades were on a trip to the East Coast for Michael’s grandfather’s 100th birthday celebration in 2000 and stopped to visit Boldt Castle on the way. That evening, while they were having cocktails at the Gananoque Inn, Janice flipped through a real estate booklet. “Honey,” she said, “do you want to buy an island?” At 8:30 the next morning, they were in the real-tor’s boat, heading out for a look.

One of their first projects was to “fix” the island’s name. “Island 101G,” as it was called on government charts and

down on the island. “I also showed Mich” —short for Michel, his given name, which got anglicized in his youth—“some pricey birch coasters online, and he made these,” Janice says, pointing to the ones under our wineglasses. “We work with a baby budget and get a lot of ta-da out of it.”

Often, projects hatch when the couple drives off the beaten path and Janice spots something. “Honey, Honey, slow down, slow down, pull over, go back,” she shouts. “And he does—he’s wonderful that way.” Which happened when she spotted a house with rustic, live-edge Adirondack siding. The owner told them it was milled nearby, and—ta-da—it was cheap. Next stop, the sawmill, where they met John, who not only cut the siding but also built a live-edge cherry dining table and a bench to go with it. (They wanted a bench for the window side of the table because they can push it underneath when it’s not needed and— more important—“you don’t have chair

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with pastels, and acrylic painting—“though so far on the island, my paint-ing has been mostly walls and trim.”

And, oh yes, they bought another place a few years back—this one, an 18th-century stone house in Langoat, a village of 1,000 in Brittany. (“Honey, do you want to buy a house in France?” Janice said when she saw it online, in the process of searching for a place where daughter Mandy could live while studying in Germany.) Of course, they’ve done all the work the Breton house requires themselves. They spend about a third of the year there, a third in their California home, and the rest at Honey Bee, renting out the island cottage for two weeks a year and the other places when they can, “so they all carry their own weight,” Michael explains.

“Instead of downsizing when we retired, we decided to upsize,” he contin-ues. “And have as many adventures as we could.”a

Ann Vanderhoof, no stranger to border crossings, wrote about cottage-friendly tapas in our Summer issue.

“We have real fairies on our island,” declares 4½-year-old Kayla, Cassie’s daughter, who is spending the summer at Honey Bee with “Nana and Papa.” Wearing her princess-pink “safety” (lifejacket) over a blue-and-purple tutu, she runs to show visitors the fairies’ house, in a tree near the dock. Sure enough, near the roots there’s a teensy wooden door (the handle and strapping mimic the ironwork on the cottage door), with two mullioned windows (complete with Lilli putian flower baskets) above it and a mossy lawn out front. You needn’t have spent much time with the Laprades to imagine the conversation that pre-ceded its construction. (“Honey…”)

The honey-do list for the island has been whittled down to lower-priority items now, leaving Michael free time to build a two-seater airplane. Of course, he didn’t have a pilot’s licence when he started. “I wanted to learn to fly in my own plane.” Next summer, he’ll add pon-toons, so he can land at the island. He’s already got the docking and refuelling systems planned. Janice’s passions are more down to earth: canoeing, sketching

you can still see its pilings underwater—“and the gentlemen would go up to the cabin for refreshment while the ladies waited on board.” In the 1940s, it became a place for illicit parties. “Whisky and women,” says Janice. “And a good time was had by all,” says Michael.

“I think the cabin was ready for us,” Janice adds. “It had been wined and dined, used and abused.”

If you look closely at the end of each log, you’ll see a roman numeral carved into it. “The cabin was built on the main-land, then disassembled, brought here, and reassembled,” Michael explains. It was likely erected soon after the Crown sold the island in 1898, but the logs may be much older. “A local historian thought they might have come from a British fort on the river, which was decommis-sioned and its lumber sold. This historian told us no one would go to the trouble to hand-adze logs like these”—some are 16 inches in diameter—“for a simple fish-ing and hunting cabin.”