Over the last few month we’ve visited Gannets on several
occasions to perform maintenance and make improvements. If you’ve been before
you may notice them!
Judith has been busy levelling and grassing some of the area
at the bottom of the garden. When we bought Gannets the bottom half of the
garden was a vegetable patch, and we kept it like that for several years.
Unfortunately as time has passed we’ve found that we’ve not had the time to
cultivate it in the way we were initially. We’ve just not been there often
enough! And although originally it was nice to have vegetables there and
available for our guests to pick and eat, in reality it didn’t happen as often
as we’d thought it would. Therefore, we’re in the process of grassing half of
that area. Judith has already grassed a part of it and a couple of weeks ago we
levelled the next part of the area. Hopefully during the year we’ll get all
that side grassed. At present we plan to keep the lefthand side of the patch
available for growing things, but we’ll see how it goes.
One of the interesting challenges of a 70s house is the
plumbing! All pipes inside the house are buried in the concrete floor, so we
have to hope that they will continue to function for as long as we need them J. But the gutters
outside drain into soakaways several feet underground, and these are pretty
inaccessible too. The problem with them is that over time the porous pipes
degrade and plant roots get in. Eventually the water coming down the gutter
downspouts will not drain away. Although the downspouts at the front of the
house still work acceptably well, we found that the one at the rear of the
house wasn’t draining at all. In heavy rain the water would back up and
overflow the gutter. I’ve therefore rerouted the downspout into the main drain.
So you will now see that the pipe has a kink in it to reach to the drain, and
I’ve also plumbed the waste from the utility room into it too. This should
resolve the problem at the back. We’ll see how the other downspouts fare over
time.
You may notice that we’ve also done some painting, given the
carpets a deep clean, and steam-cleaned the laminate floor. We think everything
looks a lot brighter as a result! And we’ve bought a new tumble drier to
replace the old one that broke. Don’t forget there’s a spare fridge in the
garage if the main fridge ever breaks down.
Finally, you will hopefully notice the new tiling in the
bathroom. When we refurbished the house we originally expected that the
oil-fired boiler would soon need replacing. When that happened, we would put a
new boiler in the garage (the pipes were positioned so that would be easy), use
the freed-up space in the utility room for storage and therefore empty the
cupboard that faces the kitchen. The idea then was that this would become a
shower cubicle in the bathroom. However, the boiler refuses to die – we had it
serviced last month and it’s doing fine! – and so we needed to put a proper
shower over the bath. To allow this, I removed the wood panelling around the
bath and tiled the walls. This left the remaining panelling along the bathside
and below the mirror looking a little out of place, and it was also starting to
rot in the corner as a result of the occasional leakage of water around the
shower screen. I’ve therefore removed all the wood and tiled everything. This
will remove the issue of rotting wood, and we think it looks better too!
Hopefully you will agree, or at least understand why we felt it necessary.
A question to our 2016 guests: is there anything else you
think we need to do? What needs to be improved to make Gannets even more
welcoming, peaceful and enjoyable for a great holiday? Do we need a larger TV?
A new sofa? A new bed? Improved lighting? Whatever you think, please make your
suggestions as comments below, email us or leave comments in the visitors’
book. We’ll listen seriously to whatever you say because we want all our guests
to have a great time at Gannets.
It just remains for me to say “happy holiday!” to all our
2016 guests, new ones and returning ones. When we arrive at Gannets, we breathe
a collective sigh of relief and relax. We’re delighted you’ve chosen to stay at
Gannets and hope that you relax and enjoy being there just as much as we do!
