This has been our first weekend without guests since April – and only our sixth this year. So John took the chance to do some maintenance in the Farmhouse and get it ready for our summer guests, the first who arrives on Friday.
He started by sanding back and oiling the kitchen worktop to make it all smooth and shiny again, and gave the aga a good deep clean. We’re also hoping to get some time to paint the walls during the week and touch up the various scratches and cracks. We’ve had to send the projector from the Games Room back to the manufacturer as we suspected the dongle we’d put in to connect laptops to it wasn’t working. This will be more of an issue in future when we have more cottages completed and plan to set up a corporate away day offering, but we needed to get it sorted while the projector was still under warranty. The company wouldn’t send out a new projector until we’d returned our current one so we had to wait for a gap in bookings – luckily they sent a replacement one straightaway that works.
And we’ve had our air source heat pumps and hot water cylinders serviced – not an easy job since two of them aren’t actually connected to the mains water yet. Turns out we have a lot of equipment that needs to be serviced regularly so John now has a Servicing Calendar to keep on top of it all!
We did try to fill the weekend by running our first flash sale last weekend with reduced prices. We were blown away by the number of people who supported us by sharing our post on social media to help us reach a wider audience – if you were one of them then thank you so much! While we didn’t end up getting a booking, we had a valuable learning. As this is the first weekend of the summer holidays, we had the calendar set to only allow a week-long booking, and we didn’t change this until the fortnight before. The majority of our guests to date have been extended families and groups and expecting them to organise multiple diaries at short notice is not realistic. So we need to give more time in future. Ironically next year we only have one week booked next summer so far – which is for this very weekend!
We’ve finally started another job in our own back garden – which has taken a back seat as we focus on the business and keeping the Farmhouse and New Barn (Games Room) looking nice and well-maintained. We started digging out the base for a new greenhouse which we bought over the winter, and digging out the base for the retaining flower bed that will support the garden of the three-bed Old Barn. Weather permitting, we have plans over the next few days to fully dig these out and concrete them both… once our helper arrives as well!
Ley Farm Cottages 