THE LOST COTTAGE BEACH HOUSE TOUR: Interior Designer Lauren Liess’ Outer Banks Surf Shack

And welcome to our beach house in the Outer Banks, the Loft Cottage. I'm about to give you guys a tour. This house has a piece of my heart. My family, my husband and I and our five kids and three dogs have been in this 800 square foot cottage for the past almost five years and we have been loving it down here. So I'm going to show you all of that. It's a tiny house so we have lots of tips and tricks for making very small square footage work for a lot of people. And this is also the house on the cover of my new book Beach Life. You can see here and I'm going to show you all of that. So come on in. I'm so excited. Oh wait, I also have to show you my favorite thing about the house which is this live oak tree. Our kids love climbing it. It's probably the reason we bought the house but the inside's pretty good too. So come see it. The house is on stilts like most of the houses down here in the Outer Banks because we are very close to the ocean and so we do have to be prepared for water. We do have one area of the house that is not on stilts and I will show you that. It's our laundry room and a little bathroom. We replaced the original board and batten siding with hardy plank board and batten and then painted it. Everybody asks me what this color is and I'm sorry I do not have the color for you. It was a color match and I don't know it so I'm so sorry but it's a really pretty warm white. I hate to say that. We replaced existing decks and then we also added on a ton of outdoor square footage with new decks. Our street is a sand street and so we're constantly coming in sandy so we have a cool little seashell foot wash here with the water so we can all wash off before coming in. The house is only 800 square feet and so we had to really make it work for our family of seven. I will show you how we did that now. Here is the house. This is the original front door. It's one of the only original things we kept in the house and we kept it in its original condition. It's super messed up and we like it that way. I wanted the patina. Come on in. We moved the front door here and I will show you where it used to be. It used to be on the front of the house but we had to change that. So first I'll show you the kitchen. I love this kitchen. It is not very big but it seriously packs a punch. The cabinets are from my collection with UV Kitchens and Baths. This is my yesteryear collection. I called it that because to me this little drawer has sort of a curve to it that you see in a lot of antique pieces of furniture and it just feels really vintage, hence yesteryear. One of the things I loved in the original house was the original porcelain knobs. We did not have enough to do in the new house once we renovated. We had a lot more cabinetry but I found really really similar ones and that really spoke to me because I actually loved the original kitchen. It just wasn't functional enough for all of us. Where you guys are currently standing used to be I think a dining area. Is that right Dave? My husband Dave is filming here so you might hear me asking questions. This was like a dining area and so this was a smaller kitchen here and then there was a side door next to where that door is and then there was a front door where should we show them around yet or is that to be revealed later? To be revealed later? To show them around. The front door, you know Dave doesn't want to show you. Okay we do not see it yet. I'll let the cameraman be in charge. So some of my favorite things about this kitchen. It is tiny but we cook a ton when we're down here. This is a 24 inch electric range. I got it in white again going for those vintage vibes. The backsplash is a hand-painted terracotta tile. This is from my collection with Arquitessa. It's called Folk Bouquet. I drew these little designs and then they were hand-painted on here. That's available and I went with black and white here. I just wanted to keep the palette really simple so we have wood everywhere and then you'll see bits of white, little accents of blue. I love these little cultures just barely there. Blues and aquas and a little bit of black every now and then. What else do you guys want to know about this kitchen? Let's see. Okay the lights. Let's talk about the lights. So these are vintage crab traps, French crab traps that we found and had turned into light fixtures. Even though this is a really tiny kitchen, I wanted it to be very functional. We like a really big sink. I like 36 or more for my kitchen sinks. 36 is sort of my ideal size. So we got this big farmhouse sink here. I looked search far and wide for this faucet which looks like an old kind of vintage laundry faucet and has the soap dish above. I love that. One of our favorite things about the house is this pass-through canteen window here. I'm going to do that if I don't break it first and show you guys. And so we do a lot of breakfast here with the kids out there. Kind of passing smoothies and eggs and then we do a lot of little happy hour type things out there. So this has really really been good for our family. Because I wanted a kitchen that was bigger than the original kitchen, we had to lose the dining space. So we actually have to dine a whole family of seven at this peninsula. So you can see we have the five bar stools in front and then we have what I like to call secret stools. There's two of these behind the bar and those are great because Dave and I can sit here and then the five kids are here. We can have a nice family dinner here or half the time I would say we're out on the extra long picnic table outside. So this house is tiny but we really really function well in this place which has been great. So this is going to get super kitchen design detail-y so if you're not into all the nitty-gritty you might want to skip this part. But I am going to show it to the people who are interested in that and learning about where my brain is going during kitchen design and how that happened. So there was a small window here originally and we got rid of it. I knew I wanted the cantina window with the pass-through bar because again trying to extend our livable space. I wanted to make the outdoors as open to the indoors as possible. So cantina window does that like nothing else. Center of this sink it's if you kind of look here I would have loved to have centered it perfectly in this room. Ideally this window and this sink would be centered on this area but it was not meant to be because of how we had to arrange things. So I'll kind of go left to right. We went with the big chill fridge which we love. The thing is so important to the vibe of the space. I went with white and the chrome accent here. We love this thing. This basket is majorly important for us in keeping us organized in this tiny house. This is where we keep all of our beach blankets and quilts and hats and everything we sort of need as we're going out the door. So what I like to do in most of my kitchen designs if you like to get the sink centered up on one wall and then the range centered up on another wall so I can multiple people working at the same time which is awesome functionally but from an aesthetic perspective it makes really really beautiful elevations when you're looking at them. So as you're looking this way you have this gorgeous focal point of the sink with the window and if you're looking that way you have this great focal point of the range and the tile and the hood and all of that. So from a perfect kitchen design perspective I would have wanted this sink perfectly centered under the peak of the room but I wasn't able to do that just because of how things shook out sort of in the cabinetry. With this, well so dear, big chill. That was really important. So as you can see we had to shift the window to make room for the big chill which in my opinion is very worth it. This baby is so important in imparting that vintage sort of yesteryear vibe. So the cottage is built in the 70s but it has sort of a 50s 60s vibe to it. So I really wanted to get the big chill in here. We went white, wanted to keep it light and airy with the chrome accents here. You'll see my dish towels were very important to me because they are always out and they're from our shop Lauren Leeson Co. and I've pulled that little accent of blue in there. I have a little nail here. This one. We have gray ones too but I love them. They're super cute. I've actually had them for almost five years now. We've been very good to them. They held up. This is our dishwasher which had to be paneled in my opinion in this situation to make the space feel bigger. This way you get all this wood across the bottom and you don't have another material jutting out making it feel smaller. Then we have the 36 inch sink which is really important to me even though it's a small kitchen. Even in tiny tiny kitchens like this one I do 36 inch sinks because they make you feel like you have a lot of space to work with and it actually ends up making the space function better and feel larger. So that's really important. Our kids do do the dishes for us so which is awesome and they're messy again so we need a big sink. This is a maple finish in our lime wash from UKBLL yesteryear collection. Every kitchen needs a junk drawer. We've got one. We actually have three. These are all junk drawers. This is a dog drawer. This is a typical junk drawer and there's a little Tupperware drawer at the bottom. Then we have the dishwasher and we have our cleaning supplies under the sink and then we have dish rags, pots and pans in here and then we use this little turnaround area as our pantry. All of our cans and jars are under there. Coming around okay then we have the 24 inch range here. We've got plates, platters, bowls, that kind of thing here and then we've got glasses, some more bowls, that kind of thing up here and showed you that. Let's see coming around this corner we have a cabinet that you can kind of reach through so that side is accessible from two sides. We've got things like dog food, really huge pots in there, coolers. It's huge so if you look at this whole area that is all of this. Wine bottles, wine bottles, important things. Do you know what I mean? Okay so then here we've got knives, pastas, snacks and then here you guys can see the secret tool. My tip with secret stools, they do not have to be as cute as your other stools because they're hidden but they do have to be really comfortable. So I will sit here and chop and work, have a glass of wine, hang out but there's this little back area that I like to put on a secret stool for a little bit of back support. It's awesome. You can do a whole long meal in here and still be very comfortable. They're upholstered which I like to do the secret stool if possible. People always think I'm really weird when I ask clients if they want to do secret stools but the ones who have them love them. Then there's the ones that just want to stand and they're ready to work but I'm a sitter when I can be a sitter. Silverware, trash recycle which is in there right now. So now I'm going to take you around to the other side of the room which is the living room. It's the only room and here that is. As tiny as this house is, the room is actually pretty big. It works really well for our family and the three big dogs. One of the things we did that I think was probably the best thing that we did that was a big splurge at the time was this house originally had flat ceilings, all low eight foot ceilings and we really wanted to vault the ceilings to give it this extra volume and height. We almost didn't do it and then I was like no no I want to save money and last minute Dave just said to me are you gonna regret not doing it and I said yes. So we did the ceilings and I'm so happy we did. It has made the world of difference and you have seven humans in this much square footage. I mean there are rainy days at the beach. You are thankful for every extra inch even if they are vertical inches. So this was a great move for us. I'm going to tell you a bit about the wood because it's it's a long story as to why the wood looks this way. So the wood on the walls is pine, it's cypress, it's random sizes. I think I did four, fives, and six inches randomly and I had our contractors mess up. I told them specifically to mess up and make different size gaps. I wanted a sort of, I love Alice in Wonderland the walrus and the carpenter, so I wanted sort of a walrus and the carpenter-esque vibe and so I asked them to you know have some some big gaps in places and there's some smaller gaps in places. I just wanted it to look sort of homemade, handmade, imperfect. So we did the cypress on the walls and then on the ceiling we did untreated cedar and it smells like heaven. The combo of the pine and the cedar together, that's my sort of Pavlov's dog smell for relaxing. I smell that. I show up from being in Virginia and get down to the Outer Banks and I smell that smell and I know it's just time to relax. So I love it so much. Originally I put the cypress on the walls because I was not sure if I wanted to paint the walls or leave them. So I had the guys put the cypress on first and took a look at it and decided not to paint it and I love it. I love the combo of the two different woods. People always ask me why it's two woods. Well that's why. This is my safety in case I wanted to paint the house and I didn't but it worked out. What else? Oh, I didn't show you guys mission control here which is really important in a small house when you have a lot of people. This peg rail is a lifesaver here. We keep our beach bags here. I keep extra little linen beach bags. I use tiny beach bags because I don't like to bring a lot of stuff to the beach. I have extra ones in the kitchen and we just wash these, throw them in the wash, switch them with other ones. They're from our shop. Hang them here, hang hats. Sometimes wet towels are here. I cleaned up for you. Don't worry. And then we have this bench which is awesome at keeping everything organized. It's mostly empty right now. I think everybody's out right now. I kicked everyone out so I could do this tour but you can see we normally keep flip-flops in here and then I keep this little caddy which is just like sunscreen and surf wax and all that kind of thing and that's just at the ready to go hide a mess. So sometimes in the winter the shoes fill up to there but it works. This little area has kept the mess at bay in this house and has allowed us to live pretty cleanly in here which is amazing. The other thing that I love and I could just not talk about enough is this hanging fish trap lantern from our shop. We're in Leeson Co. We don't have them anymore. It's been very sad but we hung this hook here for this lantern. We take it down and we bring it outside when we're eating for the back picnic table or we bring it downstairs when we're with friends and dancing and this baby sometimes moves on to the front little table when Dave and I are having a little drink out there. So love this lantern. Makes me very happy. All right another organizational area and with some hacks that I will share with you is this old industrial cart that we use. Originally I was thinking it would be sort of a bar cart over here but more than a bar cart we needed sort of an entry console. So I have this old, kind of precarious, I have this old jar vintage jar from our shop filled with necklaces, you know headphones, all those things, sunglasses. I keep like the kids colored pencils up in here, chains and I guess rocks that they find and the thing about the beach is things are always coming into your house so this is really necessary because now everything that the kids find, you know here's like a little wasp nest here, seashells, basically everything we find can just sort of get shoved in there, toys, whatever, what have you. This is an old sea sponge we got from a vintage shop years and years ago. This is some of my favorite artwork by Mary McGuire. She's an artist and I originally bought these for our tv show Best House on the Block to stage in a house and then save them for if we ever got a beach house and so when we got Lost Cottage I knew they had to go here. I love them so much. She does it in folk art style which is amazing. I will take you into the living room. The fireplace here is original but we completely changed the front of it. It used to be brick and we put this concrete over it. It's just simple plain gray concrete and we kept the original mantle and sanded it down and on top of it is just things that we've collected over time. This is one of my favorite old vintage seascape paintings. I have collected vintage seascapes for years and really had nowhere to put them and then when we got this house just moved them all here and piled them in and they fit perfectly. This is a favorite one of mine. These are a couple of old rum bottles that we've collected. We found seashells, creepy little lichen mushroom things and this is one of my favorite old bottles because it had crazy barnacles all over it. Some candles. We love lighting candles in here. Sometimes we light these candles, light those candles and light the lantern over there. We love to do that when it gets really dark and stormy. You know those days when you're at the beach and it just gets really dark and you have to run home after getting soaked. We like to put on our sweat pants and curl up in the house with candles. Also we spend a lot of time here in the off season in the winter and in the fall so it's very very cozy. Moving here to the coffee table. This is my modern main coffee table. I designed it for my collection Woodbridge Furniture in our wine wash finish and on top of it, actually underneath of it, is the Elowen rug in wool from my collection with Rugs USA. It's sort of like a white earth cream but there's some oatmeal kind of woven into it so it really hides things well and it's worked well for us with the dogs and the kids and it has gray stripes running down it. Then on top of the table we have this really really old beat up dog bitten tic-tac-toe game here. It gets a lot of use by both the kids and the dogs as children and then I have collected lots and lots of books. You're not seeing as many. I did a culling recently and brought some back to our other place but I love the local bookstore here, Island Bookstores, and they have so many great books that have to do with the ocean so we love walking over there and adding to our collection. This is a vintage basket here, another vintage rum bottle with, I forget what this is called, it's like, it's not dog grass, it's like dog, that dog fennel, dog fennel. We have a lot of this growing wild here in our yard and all around Kerala and they last a really long time so I love putting them around the house as you've probably seen. And then more books, more seashells, little vintage things. I'll show you our end table chair. Oh, this is a vintage fine. Oftentimes I pull it in here. It's a fun little woven chair. We do not have a TV in here so what we do is on the wall behind you, which is blank, we have a couple of hooks up there and we hang a sheet and we do a projector in here and then we all watch movies. This turned out to be a roundabout decision but I love that it went with this. The original chairs, leather chairs I wanted were back ordered for a long time so I got these leather butterfly chairs as temporary options and they worked out really well in here because we move them around, we bring them outside on the deck when we're having people over, we bring them underneath of the house when we have people over, and they move all over when the kids are playing games at the table. This game table is often, you know, all the stuff is sitting on the fireplace and there's just toys all over it and these chairs move all over. They come into our bedroom if you're watching movies in there so it's nice to have a flexible situation because, you know, they just like fold up and you can move them wherever you want. Okay and then this chair or this table is one of my favorites. It's a vintage vine, little wooden fish. I love that guy. It goes right between them and then we have Dave's surfboard. I got this for his 40th birthday. He's very excited. We did all this. Let's see. Okay, the sofa. So this is the Libra sofa. It's from my collection with Taylor King. I did it in a gray linen blend slipcover fabric so we can wash it when we have to. I've taken so many naps on the sofa. I love it. It's super deep so it's a good swing sofa. We'll often get four of us on here curled up watching movies. This pillow is like, I feel like everything's from our collections in this house. This is from my collection with Bed Bath & Beyond that I used to have and it's made to look like an old Martha Washington quilt. That's that. These end tables are called the leftover tables and they are a replica of a vintage table that I found that I think someone handmade in a vintage store by us and I call it the leftover table because the original one is just made from scrap wood and so we got two of these. They're from my collection with Woodbridge Furniture and they hold so many books. This is why I love them. You're not seeing a lot here right now because I cleaned up for you and kind of pulled out a little bit but these are all the cool books. I love getting books for the kids like Pirates, Old Vintage Stuff, Iron Pirate, Blackbeard. I read this. It's your theme. I bought wood. Yeah, there's a pirate theme there. I read this exact book when I was down here working in the summer in college and I remember reading it on the beach and being like, Blackbeard sailed these very waters. So that book has a little history to it and I collected more thinking my kids might have those romantic thoughts as well. I don't think they have. That's okay. There's still time. So all these cool books. I also love to collect children's books for the kids at that bookstore. So I will show you guys a couple of my favorite kids books. Wave. I don't know if you guys have heard of this one. It's a really amazing one and then I love Calvin Hotwinters. This is great. My husband and then this is one of our favorites, Spencer and Vincent. I should just do a list. I will try to do a list of books for you guys because we have some really good ones. I love reading children's books that I myself enjoy as well. A Little Cottage and okay. I'll stop now. I'll stop now. This is not my hat but I love reading children's books. Okay, wait. Last one. This is mine from when I was little. Do you guys remember Barney St. Castle? Golden Book. I love it. Okay. So I like to read books that I actually enjoyed the and so all of you kind of have a good time with them and they're great to read. Back here is, I will show you this, our front spider. I think there's a lawnmower. So here's our front porch here. I'll take you out here really quickly. It's a good spot here. This table and chairs Dave and I bought at Lowe's. I think was it on closing day for this cottage? Ace. Ace, not Lowe's, right? Ace Hardware. Dave and I bought this table and chairs at Ace Hardware. I think it was, was it closing day for Lost Cottage? On closing day we sat here, had a beer and sat on our front little porch before it was renovated and this table has some great memories for me. We bring that little lantern out here a lot and do like cheese and appetizers and out here. Like this is a really great duck space. This is where our dogs can usually be found barking at poor people who are trying to walk to the beach. It's really charming. All right. Lobster. Lobster. Oh, right, right, right. Okay. So this, we made this lamp out of an old lobster trap that was at our old house in Virginia. They used to use it to catch snapping turtles in our pond and we thought it was really beautiful and we found also at Ace this huge light bulb and attached it with ropes to the ceiling. So I love that. And another surfboard here. Foam ones are good for learning. Everything. I think I talked about every single piece. Oh, I didn't talk about the tiny lamp. I love the tiny lamp. This is the bunk room. I think it's approximately 10 feet by 12 feet. It is tiny. This is where all five of our kids plus two of our dogs sleep. The other dog sleeps with Dave and me in the other bedroom. So we have one bed here without a bunk over it. And that is Louie and Honeybear's spot a lot of the time. And then we have two beds here. Our teenagers are up on top. Our little girls are here and our middle son is here. The dogs go everywhere. Typically not on top but sometimes they can be found up there when they get help. This was meticulously planned out. These drawers are super deep. They go almost the entire depth of the bed. So each kid only has one drawer in here. So the kid that's in this bed gets this drawer and those two have a drawer each and so on. They each have their own little lanterns in their beds to turn on the light for reading. And then they have outlets as well. This thing I love. I found it on Etsy. It looks like an old fishing bobber. So that's really cool. And we have this antique dresser in here where they keep all their swimsuits, rash guards, and I keep sheets and linens for this room in here. An old vintage rug from our shop, Warren Leeson Co. And vintage pillows in here. And then if you come around this way you will see we have more books stashed up here. This is stuff that needs to be read or has already been read and we just have to use barstools to get those. That's not the stuff that's in circulation every day but we can grab it when we need it. He also raised the ceiling height in here as well. I would say that, you know, I talked about it earlier but that really is one of the best things you can do in a small house if you can raise the ceilings because this again added so much volume to the space. It also allowed for the top bunks to have, so actually if you look at the room you can see where it would have ended at that eight foot mark. So the additional space up top allows the top bunks, the teenagers, to get a lot more head space which is really important. We also put the second bunks higher up than you normally would because we have the space so you don't hit your head when you're in the lower bunks. As a family we have spent a lot of time in this room. We watch movies. Dave and I grow up with the kids. All the dogs, all the kids, all the 10 of us are in here and this room really, I don't know, it's handled the kids really really well. Oh and I'll show you the doors. I'll kind of take you around. All right so I'm going to show you something else we did here. There is a door here to the only bathroom on this floor and I wanted it to sort of disappear right within the woodwork here so it's really flat and we did have the doors custom made. So all three of these doors when they're closed, like if we have people over we want to you know just close off the private spaces, we close them and it's actually very hard to see them because they kind of camouflage away. And I'll take you into the bathroom. All right so this is our bathroom. There are a lot of people using this bathroom. So where you are currently standing was actually the closet for what is now the bunk room. So this bathroom used to not be accessible from the living room. So if you had guests over it was a jack and jill and you had to access it through the bedrooms. So what we did was we stole the closet to create a hallway to come into this bathroom. We have a toilet over here and then I also took the area where the two bunks hit and you sort of had that square connection point. That became the shower with two shower heads in it and then we put the vanity in front of the window. This is a great vanity. It has a ton of storage. Our girls use this as a ladder to climb up here. It's very functional as well. I wanted to just put some kind of unexpected touches in here. So these are outdoor lanterns and they're hanging. The only mirror in here is this vintage shaving mirror there and I always find it pointed down for a little aurora. So I can't see. Again another vintage style bridge faucet in here and we keep our towels up here on a little train rack and you can see we have a ton of pegs because there's always things drying in here. The floor... Do you want to come see over by the shower? The floor is this pebble tile as is the shower walls. I love it. It feels so good underfoot. Very natural feeling. One of my favorites and then we kept the same cypress and cedar treatments on the walls in here and then we added a door or we kept the door. Actually we moved it and then we have a door into our bedroom so we can kind of use it as a primary suite but you never know if you're going to walk in on someone so there's always the gamble. And here is another custom door. Again this is something I think is really important in small spaces. The doors when they blend in with the walls just make the space feel bigger because it's continuous. A different color or material would stop your eye and make everything feel smaller and more chopped up. So super important in small spaces. Another big space saver in here. We have only four functioning drawers in here but we have these baskets underneath where we can keep extra toilet paper and supplies as well. Oh you guys have to come see my mermaid tv holder. I did put some kitschy things in this house and I'm kind of obsessed with them. I'm going to back you on up. And so come on in to the primary bedroom. This is our bedroom and again we raised the uh to give it that extra space and I had this old pine dresser so we just used in here. This is one of my favorite pieces that I've had for sale in my shop for a while and never sold so I got to take her home. I joke that I probably put her on for too high that's why she never sold so she's mine. This is an old faux bois lamp that we found at an antique, what was it, an antique market maybe 15 years ago. One of my favorites. I've got these really cute little stars in the shade and an antique fishing bobber here. Little jewelry box from the shop. This mirror came with the house and worked perfectly. Okay do you guys want to see my closet? Come on and see. So because everything had to be small, we had no space. I have I think less than six inches of technical hanging space in here. This is an HVAC trunk line um but you can see just kind of hanging things. I got these really tiny little fabric wrapped wire hangers um so they just don't take up much space. That's our tiny closet. Um let's see this huge old dresser in here which I love. Restoration hardware, simple cream bedding here with two more of the Martha Washington pillows, linen sheets. This is an old indigo dye piece that I got from our shop a long time ago. Vintage striped rug. This is a broken lamp that doesn't work. Pocket two lamp that we have in here but I brought it. It does not work but I brought it because it was in our oldest son's nursery and I just love it. I love the vibe of it. We don't actually use it. Little jewelry box, frame TV, a huge old conch shell here. Surfboard here. It's always got sand all over it. We're used to a pile of sand there. Um linen curtains. I'll take you out here. All right so come out to our deck here. So this is our deck here. We love hanging out here. This maple tree has grown so much over the years. Over here I'm sure you recognize is the other side of the cantina window. We have our barstool here so you can see how easy it is just to pass things through, hang out, have a glass of wine and or a smoothie or breakfast. We love this space. This is our massive 12-foot picnic table so our whole family fits here and we can also entertain when other families come over. It's great. We've had many a dance party out here. I'm trying to stay under here while I walk this way. I'll take you guys around down here to see our tiny laundry room and you're good you guys. To see our tiny laundry room and we also have an extra bathroom down there that we use for when we're getting back from the beach. So come on into the laundry room. This is underneath of the house now. The laundry room was designed to be an indoor outdoor space or it's indoor but we designed it to be outdoor in case of flooding. The floors are treks and the walls are done in the same board and batten as the exterior of the house. We put the washer and dryer up about 20 inches or so in case of floods and the treks would allow the water to seep back down in We keep things off the ground. We want to be prepared here because when we first came to this house there was a lot of damage in this area of the house where you are currently standing with actually outside and then there was a storage room here that we could see had sustained water damage. The original washer and dryer were they in the kitchen? They were in the kitchen so we really had to get those down here and then there was a bathroom back here which this bathroom here we had another cedar doormade. This bathroom existed as well but we renovated it again putting the same Harvey Plank on the walls, same treks on the floors. We did the shower in the potter's tile from my collection with Garfield Testa and put a pretty little white shower curtain on it. This bathroom mostly gets used when we come back from the beach if someone needs a...okay I don't want to talk about the potty here. I'm trying not to talk about the potty that I left in the room but this bathroom mainly gets used when we come back from the beach but we do have an outdoor shower which I will show you now. Oh and we use leftover wood from inside the house for down here so this is the pine and that is the cedar because we had half and half left over. All right so come on out here I will show you our outdoor shower. Not much is unique about it except for it's very large and we love it. All right so we have a little area here with hooks and pegs for clothes and then we have a double shower in here which we love. I've been letting the Virginia creeper grow up. My baby is trying to get them to grow here. Yeah I love the shower here. This area underneath of the house is one of our favorite spots. We added the concrete flooring that used to all be sand and we hang out here all the time when it's raining and when it's not raining. These chairs are awesome. We love our hammocks. We have taken many a nap down here. Lots of times the kids will bring a big quilt down here to have food and games and we just love hanging out here. This is our beach toy cage here we had made under the stairs so we keep other surfboards and chairs in there and close it on up. We bring lanterns down here as well and we're gonna sign off. Thank you so much for watching the tour of our lost cottage. If you liked the tour definitely check out my book Beach Life which features a lost cottage and a bunch of other lost cottages that we've redone in the Outer Banks area. Also something I always forget to say is if you enjoy this tour please like and subscribe. It really helps us with the channel and we really appreciate it. Thank you and have a great summer.