Another week on and our bookings are slowly coming in, helped no doubt by the lovely reviews our guests are leaving. Last week’s visitors left our first [glowing] review on AirBnB which is a great step forward, although we need 3 before we get a rating on that site. We started off the week not having a booking for this coming week – as it’s half term for some of the country John’s been trying to get Cottages.com to update our calendar availability to be more flexible for this week and increase the likelihood of getting a booking. He had to email twice and call three times – even then they only managed to get one of the changes in. Luckily on Friday we got a last minute booking starting from Saturday for a week – and the family are very lovely so again we lucked out. Although we did the changeover last Sunday we still managed to spend all of this Saturday morning perfecting the house and making the cake for the welcome pack!
The other two bookings that came in this week are for New Year this year and Christmas next year. We’ve been slightly nervous about not getting a booking for this New Year so we’re very glad that’s come in, and impressed how people are thinking as far ahead as next Christmas already!
As we’ve now been open for almost two months, John took the opportunity of a gap in bookings to deep clean the aga and fix a few things we’d noticed had come loose. He also did a full inventory check throughout the house to make sure everything is there and in a reasonable condition – we check each changeover but as we’re time-constrained it’s only a quick visual check. Fortunately everything is ok and in the right place.
We’ve made more progress in the New Barn too. In the first floor games room I painted the second coat on the skirting boards, and the doormats arrived to make it feel more welcoming. As we want the room to be flexible about how it’s used, we’ve ordered a trolley to move the pool table up against the wall when it’s not needed (it’s just over 200kg so there’s no way we’re lifting it!!) – so John put the trolley together and we’ve stored it in the laundry for now. I finally got round to filling the holes in the wall in the laundry too – one of which appeared when we put up the garage shelves on the opposite side of the wall, and one which appeared when the electricians were fitting the light switches. Now I just need to make time to touch up all the various walls/ceilings in both our house and the New Barn…
On Friday night our drain blocked again – this time due to debris coming down from the farm above and blocking the drain rather than the rain. Luckily we got to it in time to avoid losing any of our driveway, but it made us particularly nervous when Storm Ashley came through on Sunday, and we were up early to check the drain was coping ok (which it was). Once the storm passed we made the most of the dry weather to start clearing the vegetable beds, starting with the pumpkin/squash bed and the sweetcorn. It’s been a dismal year for vegetables – as our focus has been on the building work this year we planted the squashes late and didn’t have time to feed them or trail them properly. We’re lucky to get the harvest we did really – but our bad luck didn’t end here and I managed to drop a pumpkin through the cold frame, smashing a pane. That’s another job to add to the list… The sweetcorn was another disaster. I learnt from previous years and planted it deep enough not to fall over – again it was late so we had a fairly small harvest. The squirrels helped themselves to most of it too, so we ended up with four partly-grown cobs from about 30 plants… The two things that seem to have grown well are our celeriac and runner beans despite planting them both late – we harvested them this week and got 6 celeriac bulbs for soup and 3.3kg beans for the freezer. We’ll just need to find more time next year for the rest of the garden!
I also got round to labelling up some of the batches of jam, chutney and jelly we’ve made, and update the photos on our website. Everything we sell comes from fruit grown on site – while we make almost no profit by the time you take into account the cost of the jars, labels, other ingredients and energy to cook them, we’re hoping it will eventually act as a marketing tool – helping us to stand out and raise awareness of our brand. We’re very lucky that our local milk vending shed sells some on our behalf, and once we can open the games room and get a shelf in there, it’ll be more visible to our guests too.
Ley Farm Cottages 