After a false start a few weeks ago when we started living in our new house during the day but slept in the farmhouse due to a lack of new beds, this week we finally properly moved. We’re still without beds but at least we have a mattress for the time being! We found items we’d moved out would gradually move back into the farmhouse and it’s been impossible to clean and set the place up for rental when we’ve been living there, surrounded by both old and new furniture and boxes.
So we spent the weekend moving the remaining furniture and packing up what’s left, distributing it between our new house, the games room (the sofas have gone in here to create a second lounge), and the garage and laundry. There still seems to be an awful lot left and we still need to clear the back room (which served as a utility / garage / shed) but at least the heavy items are moved and the rest should be fairly easy to shift. I’ve never clocked up so many steps just staying at home though!!
Our target is to clear all the rooms with carpets so John can clean them properly – something we never did when we moved in and one of them still has the whiff of stale cigarette smoke if you don’t leave the window open long enough. Because we’ve been using them for storage, we’ve had to sort through all the guest laundry and put that away; sort out our own amassed collection of old duvets and bedding we seem to have collected; clean the bathrooms so the new bathroom furniture can go in; empty and clean the kitchen so all the kitchenware can go away; and move all our old bedroom furniture into our new home. It’s been a tiring week but rewarding to look back at what we’ve achieved. And waking up in our new house on Sunday was pretty special after the long wait to build it and all the effort that’s gone in to decorate it – even more so when a sparrowhawk suddenly crashed into the French windows!
We’ve also been busy finally getting round to all those jobs that never quite get to the top of your priority list. We’ve finally started tiling the top of the shower in the ensuite which has been waiting since the ceiling was lifted in October – just a bit more grouting to do and that job’s finished. In the bathroom we put silicone along the edge of the bath where we’d re-laid some tiles that had come loose, and started cleaning up the grout between the remaining tiles where it had gone yellow. We cleaned and started painting the kitchen and front and back doors we’d never got to, sanding down the door frames where the doors stick in extreme weather. It’s been fine for us to have to yank the doors and use screwdrivers to prise them open – not for our guests though! And having taken a day off on Monday after last week’s terrier races, I spent the day sealing the outside of half of the windows in the conservatory – a job that had never been done when the conservatory was repaired a few years ago. At some point I’ll get to the other half – once we’ve moved all the plant pots out of the way.
Our electricians have been in this week installing a new wired fire alarm system to meet rental regulations – we now have a smoke alarm in every room, plus carbon monoxide alarms in the living room and kitchen and a heat sensor in the kitchen. They’ve done an amazing job installing it with minimal damage and positioning them so they’re not in direct sight of the light fittings as you enter the rooms. They also conducted the electrical check we need for rental (EICR) which identified a few red flags, such as lights not being earthed. We had the bedrooms fixed a couple of years ago but the electricians we used at the time hadn’t checked the rest of the house…
John has been busy fixing up the garden, seeding the remaining bare patches of grass and covering up the mole damage after my dad successfully discouraged it from sticking around; and installing solar lights around the paths so our guests will be able to see without falling over. There’s still a lot to do though – the list seems never-ending!
He’s also taken more photos and submitted them to Cottages.com to go on our listing. Cottages.com is a brand owned by Awaze who also own a number of other holiday cottage brands (e.g. Hoseasons), and they also put listings on more commonly-used third party sites like AirBnB and Booking.com. You need a minimum number of photos for the latter – more than Cottages.com need – and this weekend we finally had enough to get on these. The really frustrating thing is that somehow the information hasn’t been passed across correctly and the listing currently says we sleep 8 guests in 1 bedroom with 4 beds! We’re yet to get our first booking which in some ways is good as it means we can keep improving the house, but in others we really need to start getting an income in. Once we can get the final rooms furnished and the finishing touches in place, we can get the professional photographers in. Maybe that will make a difference…
Ley Farm Cottages 