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!

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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 🙂

It’s a Christmas miracle!

by In Ethel's House, Holiday letting, Renovations 1 Comment

Or that’s what I thought yesterday morning, anyway, when I was feeding the horses and looked up to see David’s van coming down the road!  He spent yesterday trimming doors and is in town this morning picking up some more wood and some different hinges, as he thinks the ones he got originally will look too heavy for the smaller upstairs doors.

Even better, we’re now up and running on the agency’s website!  I’ve been taking some exterior photos this morning, which are so huge that my email provider refused to send them, so they’re going via WeTransfer and I hope one or two will be good enough to use.  I keep forgetting to check the fitting on the bottle lamps, but between Christmas and New Year I’ll get some lightbulbs and then start taking some interiors.

Caroline causes chaos

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Well, that didn’t quite go as planned.  Storm Caroline arrived earlier than expected, and after I got pinned against the field gate with two buckets of horse feed until the gusts dropped sufficiently for me to open it, we decided to abandon the idea of trying to get the coffee table into the car on health and safety grounds.  The electricals were loaded up and we went down the road, only to find that the power was off at that end of the village.

This was a problem, because (a) I still needed to hoover and (b) the sky was so grey that there wasn’t enough natural light to take interiors.  So we zoomed back home, rang SSE to report the fault (who, I have to say, have been absolutely excellent at getting it sorted and keeping me informed of progress) and then rang Annie, the Scottish Cottages area representative, to see if she still wanted to come up or whether it would be better for her to turn back.  She said since she was only 20 minutes away she might as well come on up and we could at least get all the paperwork done and do the grading.

So the upshot is that we’re all signed up, Ethel’s House will be going live on their website in about a fortnight (if I can take good enough pictures myself) and will be available for guests from 1st March next year (which gives me a chance to get a few friends to stay in it and tell me what I’ve missed), and I am the proud owner of a 4* (and apparently a high 4*) holiday cottage 🙂

Stick a fork in it, it’s done (nearly!)

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Weather permitting (we’re due 70mph here with snow), Scottish Cottages will be here in the morning to take photographs and thankfully, after a long stint this evening hanging pictures and making beds, we have something for them to photograph.

The landscapers turned up yesterday and have made really good progress.  They’ll be back first thing with one final load of gravel and then we can put the old flagstone path to the front door back down.

That’s Dougie’s van in the first picture, he’s been here all day and as a result the final light is up in the living room, all the sockets are in, all the pendant lights are in and all the smoke alarms and CO2 alarm are installed and tested.

I’ve shopped like no-one’s business over the past couple of days.  Yesterday I went into town, paid for the carpets, spent £550 on plates, glasses, cutlery and kitchen equipment in Tesco, £370 at CLB (Caithness Livestock Breeders, our local agricultural store, who have a wonderful homeware and clothing section as well) on four wool rugs and four pictures, and a final £85 at Serendipity (local ironmonger/garden centre/homewares) on a log basket, fire irons and a doormat.  Today I picked up all my lampshades and cushions from Just Wright Crafts to add to my wonderful gin bottle lamp bases I found on Etsy and finally I think I can say we’re looking close to finished.

Still to do in the morning – take the coffee table, TV, microwave, kettle and toaster down the road, along with a selection of books for the shelf on the landing, bake cookies, stick some logs in the log basket, put the crockery on the kitchen shelves, touch up any really obvious bits of paintwork, hoover throughout and clean the downstairs windows.

We’re furnished

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Carl and Anne from Riverside Interiors turned up with a van stuffed to the brim and since there’s nothing more likely to guarantee that you’ll start banging furniture into walls than someone standing there watching, I showed them where the tea and oat crumblies were, explained what was going where and left them in peace.  A few hours later I went back down and the house has basically been completely transformed.

Double bedroom:

Twin room (doors waiting for David’s return!):

Single room:

Living room:

Kitchen – that table extends, so will seat five comfortably when the house is fully occupied:

Still a big list of jobs to be done, but really absolutely definitely on the home straight now.

The carpet has landed

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We got the painting done in the nick of time, finishing off the top coat on the bannisters on Saturday afternoon (I was away from Sunday to Tuesday).

Much to our surprise, Dougie was down there on Saturday as well, wiring up the living room lights.

He said he’d probably be back today and we warned him it might get crowded – it certainly was!  By the time I went down the road with mugs for tea and a big box of homemade oat crumble biscuits, the carpet van, Pete’s van, Ian’s truck and Dougie’s van were all crammed in.  Dougie has been working on fitting the extractor fan and I’m going to have to figure out how to disguise David’s patch to put a piece of studwork in for it to be attached to, but it’s up at least.

Pete and Ian have been working on the woodburner.  Too dark to get a picture of the top hat on the chimney that the flue liner is hanging off, but the stove is in place and hooked up.

Everything from the bottom of the stairs upwards has been the domain of the carpet fitters today and they’ve done a wonderful job.

And the results of the shopping spree have started to turn up!  (Inspector dogs and bucket of headcollars not included!)

Tomorrow is furniture day and apparently they’ve been playing Tetris with the van all afternoon to see if they can do it in one load (as it’s a 52-mile round trip).  They’ll be here late morning, which gives me time to get down the road first thing and hoover up all the loose tufts of carpet.  By the end of tomorrow, it’s going to look very, very different.

 

Time to shop

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I’m NEARLY there with the landing!  Just one top coat of Milk White to go on the bannisters and I’m declaring it done, although in truth I’ll probably paint that loft hatch white as well over the next few weeks.

Dougie has been back.  Remember we had a problem with the hot water not working and Jeff the heating engineer told me the switch had been unwired in the boiler?  Dougie gently reminded me that he’d fitted a master control switch for the boiler next to the manifold and had we checked that the hot water was on…?  Sure enough, one quick button press from OFF to CONTINUOUS and we were in business, so I shall be ringing Jeff tomorrow to tell him I’m an idiot and asking him to come back on a dry day and service the boiler!  I also need to order some oil, but the padlock on the tank has rusted shut again and Mick is in London until tomorrow evening.  It’s not super-low, so it can wait for a couple of weeks, as they won’t be able to deliver with (a) carpet fitters and furniture vans parked outside next week or (b) the landscaper digging up the parking area to gravel it.

Anyway, Dougie has nearly finished the kitchen lights, which look great, and will be popping back and forth over the next fortnight to finish everything else off.  (They’re all silver, but they reflect the wall colour, so look turquoise in this picture!)

We emptied out my office a bit further at the weekend – I’m thinking I should have maybe gone for silver appliances 🙁  Oh well, when these need replacing I can change.  I absolutely refuse to have integrated ones, I hear nothing but grumbles from people who have them!

Parcels are starting to arrive now – the three Velux blinds are here, the two Roman blinds are in transit, the curtain poles and curtains have all arrived too, but it’s all sitting in the office for the moment.  I took advantage of a Debenhams one-day 50% off on bedding and bought 5 duvets, 10 pillows and a king-size mattress protector (all the singles were gone) for £100, but at checkout they advised delivery for the Highlands was up to 2 weeks, so I hope they get here in time for the photographs, otherwise it’s going to be a sprint over to Tesco.  I’ve also ordered all the lampshades and cushions from a fantastic local business, Just Wright Crafts, I’m particularly fond of this Highland Cow lampshade which will be going in the hall and will hopefully put a smile on people’s faces when they walk in!  I’ve found some plain white wooden candlestick-style lamp bases on eBay, so have ordered one to see what they’re like – hopefully they’ll be fine for the bedside tables and the living room.

Tomorrow is Black Friday and I’ll be shopping primarily for the following:

  • Television
  • Blu-ray player
  • Freesat box
  • Bluetooth speaker for kitchen
  • Microwave
  • Bedspreads
  • Bedding
  • Towels

However, Schofields Insurance has put together this incredibly handy list of 200+ items you need in your self-catering cottage, so I think I need to print it out and start ticking it off.  For things that are easily breakable or stainable, I either need to shop within an hour’s drive (e.g. crockery from Tesco – their new Fox and Ivy premium homeware range actually looks very good) or buy generic (Out of Eden’s plain white Egyptian cotton bed linen) so it can be replaced by another brand if necessary without looking mismatched.