A winter lodger and a late weekend booking

This weekend we tackled another of our ‘Big jobs for 2025’ – cleaning out the shed and tidying it. It’s been a few years since we last did it and over time, things have just piled up in a very inefficient way. Where we don’t have doors on the shed, the recent storms blew leaves in – it looked a complete mess. There was a particularly bad smell at one end where we thought something had died, which was also putting us off a bit. However we also realised that it was going to be difficult to get any other garden jobs done because we couldn’t really access anything in there easily, so decided to face it.

And we’re really glad we did – in emptying it we found a lovely hedgehog hidden under a table cover and hibernating amongst the leaves in the middle of the shed. We could easily have knocked him and hurt him if we’d tried to get tools out. Instead we cleaned the corner of the shed, relocated him onto a bed of leaves and tucked him in for the rest of the winter. It’s pretty crazy that he continued sleeping through the entire thing – clearly a deep sleeper!

The shed now looks clean and tidy, with a big bag of rubbish ready to go to the tip, and no decomposing animals found which is a big win. Turns out the smell was coming from an empty dumpy bag – although we have no idea what had been in it before!

We’ve had a few more bookings this week – mainly for the summer holidays – which is reassuring as we’d been worried about how empty our calendar was looking. We had a last minute booking through on Thursday lunchtime for this weekend – while the house was mostly ready, the games room still needed finishing which meant a late night rush on Thursday night to get everything done! Luckily we’d ordered the remaining equipment last weekend and it had arrived in various deliveries throughout Thursday, so once we’d finished the house, we spent Thursday night unpacking glasses and mugs, and unpacking and making tables. John then cleaned it thoroughly on Friday and stocked it with drinks before our guests arrived, and finished his welcome folder explaining how everything works. The only things we didn’t manage to do were to hang the coat hooks and put the sign up outside – perhaps they’re jobs for next weekend…