After months of living with piles of boxes everywhere in both our house and the garage, this weekend we finally dedicated time to tidying it all up. Because we’ve moved into a much smaller house we have a rule that nothing gets put away without being sorted and cleared. We still have plenty of boxes in the barn to sort through but we’d moved some into the house straightaway where the contents were a bit more fragile. It’s been driving John mad as it’s been hard for him to clean thoroughly, so once we’d finally put them all away he had no excuse! Evie and I made ourselves scarce and he cleaned the house from top to bottom – it actually looks quite nice now.
Our new garage shelving arrived on Friday so I took the opportunity to empty the garage and build them. The garage has been a mess since we moved and filled it with a load of boxes from the farmhouse – it’s been impossible to find anything or actually use the room. So building the shelving and sorting through boxes we’d accumulated over the last few years has been as therapeutic for me as it was for John to clear the house. Plus I got to bash things together with a mallet which is always fun and stress relieving!! There are still some boxes to sort through but already it looks and feels better.
It also meant we unpacked all the boxes of jam, chutney and jelly that we’ve been storing ready to sell. We’ve managed to sell some through Daisy’s Dairy (our local milk vending machine shed) and a few to people at work, but we still have a lot left! We plan to put some in our games room and I’ve also started to build a webpage showcasing our produce which we share with guests in our welcome email. Hopefully we can start to sell a few more now, especially as it’s got into harvest season and we’ve got more fruit ready to cook.
We waved goodbye to our third guests on Friday – they stayed for two weeks and were such lovely people with the friendliest dog. They were also the first guests to use our EV charger. It was nice to see it being used and to make sure everything worked with the charger and with our payment process. Our next visitors were arriving Friday afternoon which meant we had our first experience of a same-day changeover – a little nerve-wracking to start with as we weren’t sure if we could get everything done in six hours. Our previous guests had left the house in great condition though and stripped the beds, so it was all easier than it could have been. We did have to change three of the beds from doubles to singles which meant extra bedding changes and moving the furniture around three of the rooms. The dog was pretty determined to make it all a bit more challenging too…
As our fourth set of guests (a group of 8 lads) left on Sunday we took the opportunity of the weekend to do the changeover ready for our next guests who are arriving on Friday. Most of the beds needed changing back to doubles (!) but that was probably the hardest part of the changeover as the house had been left clean and tidy. Well – that and sorting out the recycling. Our bin collectors are going to think we have a drinking problem!!
Both our second and third guests have given us a review this week – they’re the first ones to go on Cottages.com which is incredibly helpful for us. And they both gave us a glowing review too which also helps!! We’ve intentionally kept our prices a little lower to start with to focus on securing volumes of bookings and hopefully reviews with each one too, although it’s a little tough when we think about how much time we spend getting the house ready for each visit. We seem to have spent all this week and weekend either cleaning or washing and ironing between stays! Every business needs to start somewhere though.
This week has been a learning experience with bookings as well. We have a number of bookings that looked like they were guests coming from San Francisco. It took a while to realise that these are actually our AirBnB bookings – and also that the email addresses coming through with the bookings aren’t actually our guests’ email addresses. Any messages sent via AirBnB aren’t sent to us either, which means that to contact the guests John has had to text each one to ask for an email address. We’ve managed to get through to 3 out of 4 of them so far.
Last Sunday ended up being a bit of a problem. The rain was so heavy that it brought lots of debris down off the hill and blocked our drain again. The overflow system worked to take the water out through the gate but it wore through our stoned driveway again, which meant John had to spend Monday morning sweeping the stones off the road and putting the drive back together. We also had a leak in the house where the roof joins the old barn because of the strength of the rain and direction of the wind. Our builder and roofer were amazing – our builder was in contact straightaway and our roofer was over on Monday to take a look. We’re very lucky to have found such a good team.
Ley Farm Cottages 