As we mentioned recently, the inn has been undergoing some changes. We never have time to do anything but emergency repairs during the busy season so this is the time of the year to get up and get working on the inn. No more sleeping in, no more bon bon eating, no more manicures (which is really hard on Dave) because we have work to do!
We joke that having guests is like having a houseful of teenagers eating you out of house and home, creating laundry and putting dings in the walls. The truth is that no matter how much we love our guests there is a lot of normal wear and tear that needs put back together.
After 11 years, we realized that we were sick and tired of some of the rooms. We were bored with our own house and some things just needed to get changed or finished.
We also noticed that our web photos were looking sad and tired too. Unfortunately we aren't up to creating good pictures. Seely attended the Professional Association of Innkeepers conference in January and hired a photographer to take new pictures of the inn.
This created deadline pressure to get things spruced up.
We've spent the last month frantically painting, redecorating, buying art for the walls, moving furniture around and generally making ourselves crazy. We've become good friends with the guys in the paint department at Home Depot. Last weekend Seely's sister and her friend came up to help us finish up in time for yesterday's photo shoot. We couldn't have done it all without them.
Yesterday the photographer and his stylist spent almost 13 hours shooting nine rooms of the inn. It was an amazing process. They will be back in June to shoot the rest. We will be posting the first shots very soon. .
In the meantime, we have dining room tables, closets, and kitchen space taken up by abandoned props, left over bits of construction materials and wrappers for linens. The truck is full of rejected linens and other things waiting to be returned to the stores. We haven't accounted for all the paint brushes and rollers so they must still be waiting in a fridge somewhere to be used again.
How did this happen? Who left this mess? More importantly, who is going to clean it up? Since it is unlikely that either of us have a Fairy Godmother coming to the rescue we'd better set the alarms for early tomorrow morning....