Our first guests!

This week saw the culmination of all our hard work over the last five years, as we hosted our first guests in the Farmhouse over the weekend. Almost everything we’ve been doing for the last month has been focused on getting the Farmhouse ready so it was a strange feeling on Friday when we were literally forced to stop. The last week has been particularly crazy – I took the Thursday and Friday off work and between us we managed to get through a pretty immense list of jobs. All well worth it though to see how much our guests enjoyed their stay here – they wrote a lovely first review in our guest book and added a very appreciative comment on our facebook page.

The main jobs we got through included:

• Weeding the back garden and cutting back the lavender and roses; then staking the roses with metal stakes this time so they don’t snap;
• Putting wicker fences across the routes into the Elizabethan cottage (for safety) and also sectioning off the kitchen garden so our guests have privacy while we’re working in there;
• Potting up the new olive trees that we bought to replace the bushes we inherited in rotten half-barrel pots;
• Moving our collection of pots (and plants) and distributing them either to our [new] back garden or the front of our house and the Farmhouse;
• Mowing the lawns around the house (and putting the cuttings in the compost so they weren’t trodden in through the house);
• Adding a picket fence at the front of the lawn to stop anyone falling off the edge into the courtyard;
• Putting fencing across the orchard entrances;
• Touching up paint throughout the house – including filling in the cracks where the house has moved during the build and covering all the scratches during moving;
• Sanding and repainting various windowsills that we’d never got round to while living there ourselves, and built-in cupboard shelves that had faded over time;
• Putting up pictures kindly donated by my mum throughout the house so the walls don’t look bare;
• Adding a mirror and floating hooks into the top floor yellow bedroom for hanging clothes, as there’s no space for a wardrobe because of the pitched ceilings;
• Removing the half-dead Madagascan jasmine from the conservatory and relocating it into the greenhouse where it might prefer the slightly-cooler temperature;
• Failing to work out how to install child locks in the top floor windows so instead putting screws into the frame so the windows don’t open enough for anyone to fall out;
• Securing various bits of furniture to the wall so they don’t fall onto anyone;
• Moving the curtain rail and hanging new curtains in the top floor yellow room;
• Cleaning every room thoroughly;
• Ironing all the new bedsheets and changing them so they’re fresh;
• Adding the finishing touches like the towel rail signs and the little characters we’ve bought/kept over the years to add a bit of character to the rooms;
• Writing the Welcome Book – including various bits of information about the house, and the local area and things to do while here.

It feels like a pretty busy few days once you write it all down!

Our new sofas arrived just in time on Wednesday. The ones we had planned to use didn’t quite fit enough people so we moved those into the games room to create a cinema space, and ordered new ones which were a bit smaller. They look perfect in the room – especially once we added the extra cushions we’d bought to brighten the room up and continue the countryside and farmyard theme.

We had our professional photos taken on Friday morning – it’s part of the package we have with Amaze (the parent company that owns Cottages.com to make your house look more appealing on their website. The photographer Simon Plant was fantastic and helped us ‘prop’ the rooms to make them lived in. In his experience people rarely read the details about a property but instead look at the photos and imagine themselves there, so anything that looks luxurious or a treat helps to sell the property. John duly went out early Friday to buy scones, cream and flowers – we spent the first few hours on Friday getting the rooms ready and photos taken, and then treated ourselves to a quick break with scones, cream and homemade jam for breakfast!! A little frustratingly, Amaze only pay for 15 professional photos regardless of the size of the property. We currently have 24 photos on the site at the moment so will need to add some more of our own once the professional photos have gone up.

Our builders and electricians were also super conscious of the fact we had to be ready for visitors by Friday, so the site’s been busy throughout the week as they finished off their own list of jobs. The electricians had a long job of their own – they:

• installed electrical sockets in the greenhouse so I can put the propagator in there in late winter (now there’s no space to put it in our new house);
• added an extra strip of lighting in our new kitchen over the sink so you can see when washing up;
• disconnected the three-bed barn from the main farmhouse supply (the connection between the two buildings had been put in years ago when the previous owners ran a carpentry workshop from the barn, and just hadn’t been disconnected when we installed the new electrical supplies;
• fixed the ‘Eddi’ which is the device that tells the hot water cylinder to use solar power to heat water when we’re exporting power;
• Changed the wiring so the sewage treatment plant (our spaceship) runs off our solar-generated power instead of grid electricity;
• PAT tested the appliances in the Farmhouse (things like hairdryers, extension cables etc).

And excitingly they installed our first EV charger! We want to make our property more environmentally friendly – making our property accessible for electric vehicle drivers has always been part of our vision.

Our builders were back on Wednesday and Thursday to install shutters on the Old Barn (three bed) – these are the old doors that were taken off when we installed the large windows in their place. Part of our planning permission required us to install the doors as shutters to retain the feel of a barn – they’ll also be useful to protect the windows and reduce the amount of cleaning required!! The original plan was to put them on runners at the top and bottom so they slid across, but because we have lovely slate sills at the bottom the runners don’t work, so we’ll need to come up with a different plan. They also installed the remaining part of the downpipe on our New Barn (a mistake in the way the stairs were built meant the gap for the downpipe wasn’t centred and so either the downpipe needed to be moved a little to the left, or a whole section of the stairs needed to be rebuilt; we chose the former. There’s a bit more to be done, but at least most of the equipment was tidied away by Friday, and both the skip and portaloo that have adorned our courtyard since February 2023 has finally gone!

We took the chance while our guests were here to make some progress in our house. We’ve been surrounded by boxes and suitcases since we moved in while we focused on the Farmhouse – so managed to clear through a few of these this weekend. I hoovered the attic (a first!!) so we could start storing less-used items up there, and installed door stops and our key rack in an attempt to find a home for some of the things currently living on our kitchen work surface.

Our first visit has been fortuitously timed with the start of harvest season – I had the chance to collect the windfall crabapples and make the first batch of crabapple jelly this weekend, as well as cleaning and freezing damsons and apples to make damson jam when we have a bit more time. We’re aiming to sell some of our produce to our guests once we get the Games Room finished as there’s a nice space for a shelf there; and Daisy’s Dairy – our local milk vendors – kindly sell some of our jam in their vending machine which does quite well for us.

Our weekend finished with our first ever changeover – a much-needed practice run since our next booking currently isn’t for a few more weeks. John spent Saturday working out a plan between us that optimised our 6-hour changeover window to get everything emptied, cleaned and restocked – and he did a great job! We found a few things to change throughout the day but we somehow managed to clean the house top to bottom in 5h30m, and it looks spotless! Having the separate laundry is proving great too – although it means trips back and forth from the Farmhouse and now from the Shippon, I’m now on wash 7 out of 9 and our house isn’t cluttered by washing. It almost feels luxurious. Meanwhile John’s ironing pile has just grown by another four beds…