We’re typically pretty late in decorating the house for Christmas but as we’re now open to guests we wanted the place to look a little festive. John’s started with putting Christmas lights all around the outside of the shippon – both along the road and in the courtyard. It looks so pretty lighting up the darkness, even if the storm did decide to blow the strings around a bit. We had planned to decorate the house too but our next guests don’t celebrate Christmas so we’ll decorate between bookings, ready for our Christmas week guests.
We’ve very nearly finished the games room (it feels like I say this every week though!). This time we installed the cue rack for the pool table, replaced a curtain that had been sent with the wrong colour eyelets, and secured the DVD racks to the wall, sorting through the DVDs so they’re in some sort of order. Our final job is to put up coat hooks but as the ones we have weren’t sent with suitable fixings, we need to find some first. Oh, and we also need to get the flooring people back to fix some bubbles we’ve found, and order some side tables but then we’re ready to go! We’ve taken photos ready to add to our listing for future bookings, which we’re aiming to do before Christmas as we’re told December and January are busy months for booking staycations. We’ve already had two more bookings this week – one of which includes our first summer holiday booking – although January through to mid April are still relatively quiet. We do have to squeeze in a garden overhaul at some point when we don’t have people staying but it would also be nice to have a few more bookings in the diary!
As we didn’t have anyone this weekend we took the opportunity to do a few odd jobs in the farmhouse. Mostly things you probably wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look for them, but each week when we clean they become increasingly obvious! We cleaned up plaster splashes and stained a couple of beams we missed before we moved; finally finished the brick path we made about a year ago (there were still a few corners where I needed to chisel bricks to shape); and touched up paint smudges and cracks throughout. It’s amazing how a bit of paint makes a room look better.
It’s been a weekend of more odd jobs too. After our dismal year in the orchard we’re trying to keep up with everything we need to do to improve the harvest – starting with greasing the tree trunks to stop insects climbing up and destroying the buds and fruits. It’s supposed to be done at the start of Autumn (and again in February), but at least we’ve done it now. And perhaps this means we don’t need to do it in the Spring… We’ve also been chopping up the remaining apples to freeze ready for jam and cleaned the apple rack ready for next year; and made this year’s only batch of medlar jelly. And we emptied out all our dahlia pots so we can store the tubers over winter.
We’ve been very lucky to escape without much storm damage. Like most people in one of the warning areas, we spent most of Friday night and Saturday on edge waiting for something to happen and constantly checking our trees to see how much they were bending. On Saturday we had intermittent power cuts continually which made it difficult to get through the baking and washing; one of our veg bed covers and our pea frame were blown apart and snapped. Still – it could have been so much worse and we still had plenty of jobs to do that didn’t require electricity. And now we have a new Spring 2025 job – rebuilding our pea frame and making a proper bed with rabbit protection as we know they frequent the orchard and love to munch our pea plants!
Despite having an extra day off this weekend we still have a long list of jobs we didn’t get done… there really isn’t ever enough time… until next weekend…
Ley Farm Cottages 