Another month gone

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I have 31 days left until we’re officially open for business, which is really quite astonishingly scary.  BT was supposed to come this week (although on Wednesday, not Thursday as I wrote in my last post) and even phoned me on Monday to remind me to be at the house for the engineer.  I got there just before 1pm, took the lid off the plaster ready to fill in the remaining plasterboard screw holes in the hall from when David had to make the door into the kitchen smaller, and found that it was (a) solid and (b) mouldy.  So I masked off the front door and the skirting boards and was happily slapping a base coat of white matt emulsion over the walls that didn’t need filling while listening to Judge Rinder and Escape To The Country (I do like having the TV working down there).

Escape To The Country finished, so 4pm and still no engineer.  I’d run out of things to paint, took my overalls off, sat on the sofa and played backgammon on my phone for a bit.  At 5pm I saw headlights, which got my hopes up temporarily, but it was Mick home from work and come to see what was happening.  He went home and let the dogs out and I stayed until 5.55pm when I decided the engineer probably wasn’t coming, went home and got straight onto Live Chat with BT.  They were extremely apologetic – apparently there’s an issue at the exchange which meant my line couldn’t be connected that day and they weren’t expecting an update until 5th February.  They’re going to compensate me for the missed appointment, I didn’t ask them to, it was offered automatically, and I’ve asked them to make sure that I won’t be billed for the line and broadband until it’s actually installed and working, because my first bill is supposed to generate on 3rd February.

Dougie has been back, fitting ethernet and TV sockets in the bedrooms, along with the outside lights and finishing off a few things in the kitchen.  The oven needs an inline 15amp fuse, which isn’t standard and he’s had to order, and when he opened the box for the weatherproof outdoor switch (we have two outside lights which will illuminate the back garden and the sheep fank) it turned out to be a socket, so that has to be changed, but we do now have the under-unit lighting working in the kitchen and it looks great – the spots in there are very bright, but these give the perfect amount of light for eating supper round the table.

Mick has been working in the bathroom all weekend.  For a man who claims to hate tiling, he’s really very good at it.  Shower screen up and shower fitted next weekend, we hope.

Finally, as we’re supplying all logs, peat and kindling for our guests, we thought we’d better get cracking on with our woodpile.  We got it delivered free because it came out of Strathy Forest when they were felling for the windfarm, which is only three miles away, so it’s been lying in the field for a few years while the sap dries.  Now Euan is turning it all into woodburner-sized chunks for us, so we can cart them down the road and stack them in the big barn to finish drying.  Jack is inspecting progress here!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

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It’s been a funny sort of week.  I really, truly, honestly was intending to get the hall decorated, but I lost most of Monday having to go into town, Tuesday we had a dumping of snow and I ended up hauling 45kg of sheep lick quarter of a mile down the road on my garden trolley and bringing a couple of bales of hay for the horses on the return trip, which left me rather too knackered to do much else physical,  and on Wednesday I went down to feed the sheep, intending to get started, and found Dougie there, which was a nice surprise.

He came back Thursday and Friday morning as well, so that was the week gone for painting, as I’d have been in his way, but we do have the electrics mostly done and dusted now.  Still outstanding are a special 15amp inline fuse for the oven, which is not standard and he’s had to order, earthing to the pipework in the bathroom, and the outside electrics.  He’s making up a board for the power to the byre, which I’m going to have to clear out next week, as he’s unlikely to be able to get into the first one to fit the board at the moment, from memory there’s rather a lot of junk in there.

Also this week, Colin Chessor’s came out and fitted the satellite dish on Thursday, which meant I had to buy a TV licence finally.  At least no more stern letters from TV Licensing 🙂  BT is coming on Thursday to get the phone line installed, but Openreach asked if they could come this week and do some work, as the original line to the house had been reallocated to someone else and they needed to do some rewiring.  Because of the snow, Jamie couldn’t find the access point nearest the house, but we’re now wired up as far as the corner of Ronald’s field and he’s left my line clearly labelled for the BT engineer to hook up on Thursday.  Hopefully.

I’ve been meaning to get the electricity key meter swapped out for a credit meter as well, because I’d always thought that pre-paid electricity was more expensive, so I rang SSE on Wednesday to arrange it.  They took all my details, asked what the house was used for, ran some calculations, and worked out that I’d be about £55 better off a year by sticking with the key, as the credit tariffs have changed and the key tariff hasn’t.  So I shall just have to add a tick box to my changeover checklist to make sure that there’s at least £50 credit on the meter before each new guest arrives.

Saturday’s job was a bit more of a fun one – head up the hill behind the house and try and take a decent marketing shot of the house in the snow, showing its wider position.  Sadly I missed the blue sky in the morning (we were in town), but Joyce had her drone up taking footage of the village and though it’s mainly her fields and the beach, she’s very kindly given me a USB stick with the raw footage on so that I can edit together a promo video to show that Armadale is just as pretty in winter.  She’s also offered to come and fly the drone over the point and take some specific footage of Ethel’s for me when we have some green grass, blue skies and sunshine again.  In the meantime, this was my best effort!

We have doors!

by In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged , 1 Comment

David arrived on Monday and ended up staying for the whole week, much to my joy.  The doors have been an absolute pain, because we left the original doorframes in and they weren’t quite square, so there’s been a lot of shimming and planing.  But they’re in and they look fabulous.  (Please note how I have accidentally managed to buy a landing lampshade in nearly the exact same colour as the stair wall!)

The living room door has been a particular pain in the behind, because the area of the wall to the left was only half an inch wider than the oak surround David was using.  He suggested that he get some more oak skirting board instead and use that, rather than leave me with a tiny strip to paint.  It’s very slightly lighter, but not too noticeable and I think it looks neater having it flush to the wall.

I have some very careful painting to do on the inside of the door frames where David’s planed them down.  He’s also fitted the upstand and splashback in the kitchen and tidied up the cupboard doors on the landing – the composite board he’d made them out of has shrunk quite badly in the warmth from the heating manifold and there was a big gap between each pair of doors.  He’s carefully fitted a wooden strip to each so that they close flush again.  Not sure whether to paint these or not – they tone in with the carpet and I quite like the contrast.

We’ve had two further bookings, from complete strangers this time – both of them couples and bringing dog(s).  One is for a week in April and the other is three nights in mid-March, so we really have to get sorted now!  Mick has been doing more tiling in the bathroom this afternoon and now there are no more doors or furniture being carried around the place, I can get my overalls back on and paint the hall next week.  So nearly there…

Hello 2018

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We’re having an unexpectedly soggy start to it up here – we were forecast a nice dry day with a gentle breeze to the south, so Mick set off down the road this morning intent on clearing out the woodwormy boards from the barn and having a big bonfire.  It was going well until about half an hour ago when the skies opened, but he’s manfully carrying on, as there isn’t that much left to go (we had a big fire on Saturday as well and got rid of all the wood lying out in the field).

I’ve been cramming myself into the corners of the bedrooms with my tripod and camera and think I’ve managed to come up with some photos good enough to go up on Scottish Cottages.  They accepted the exterior ones anyway, which is good, so I’ve sent five shots of the bedrooms over and tomorrow I’ll get Mick to help me load the coffee table into the car and then I can stage the living room and photograph that as well.

In very exciting news, we have our first booking!!!  Cheating a bit, because it’s a friend, but she emailed me the other day to say she’d booked a week in the summer and was looking forward to seeing us 🙂  Neither she nor I have had a confirmation email through yet, but I’m assuming that’s because everything’s shut down for the holidays and the agency won’t confirm until the deposit has cleared through their payment system.

As far as I can tell at the moment, the start of 2018 for us is going to look something like this:

January & February: finish Ethel’s.  We have 59 days until we could potentially have a guest, as it’s available from 1st March.
March:  Hopefully welcome first guests (it’s an early Easter this year).  Get house-cleaning routine thoroughly documented so it can be handed over to Clean Bees if necessary.
April:  Get to grips with social media promotion before lambs start arriving for cute photo ops!

What we’ll do post-Ethel, we’re still not 100% sure.  Our options are:

  1. Buy another holiday let
  2. Buy another project to renovate into a holiday let
  3. Buy a plot and build a holiday let
  4. Build a house and agricultural shed on a big field we already own in the village (I need to get planning through for the shed this year, as I need to apply for a crofting grant for it before Brexit happens – it needs full planning rather than prior notification because the site is less than 25m from the road, so we might as well put a house on the same application)
  5. Renovate the house we live in which is, to put it politely, looking a bit tired

One thing’s for sure, it’s not going to be boring 🙂