Fieldfare Lodge

No news for a whole year – seems like we must have been busy, but I’ve actually been doing practically nothing.  We’ve welcomed lots of lovely visitors and shared life stories/photos of grandchildren/pictures of pets – it’s been great.  

The shower cubicle in the Lodge has been given some lovely new waterproof wall boards, meaning there will be no more nasty black stuff in the corners.  

We have a new Sky satellite dish.  The old one was too far away from the box, apparently.  The signal seems more stable.  There’s half a chance we might get faster broadband sometime this decade.  We’re not holding our breath.

We lost most of the doves to some revolting pigeon disease in January and February, but the numbers are on the increase again.  It was odd for a while…  But the pheasants and the partridge bred really well this year and seeing the babies has been a delight.

The grey squirrels have vanished.  None of us have seen any for 6 months – we have no idea what’s happened to them.  

Our last chicken is now completely free range – we don’t have the heart to keep her in the paddock by herself, so she spends her days hanging out with the wild birds.  We have no idea how old she is, because she was rescued.  She just does her thing, and begs anyone she happens upon for food.  Like she doesn’t eat us out of house and home.

Our Aga runs on wood pellets.  I had no idea that wood pellets come from the Ukraine.  So the Aga hasn’t been lit since the war started, because the pellets that are available are three times the price they were last year.  On the other hand, we got ourselves an AirFryer and are now wondering why we need an Aga anyway 🤣 

I had put my back out in November 2021 (lifting a very heavy box of tiles (37kg)), and by February was at the doctor’s whining about how bad the pain still was.  Got an MRI in July, and in August was told I’d bust my back.  That explained everything.  My back still hurts but physio is making it better, if more slowly than I would like.  So, no builders this year, but with a little luck next year will see the house finished.  Properly finished, 5 years later than anticipated, but worth waiting for.

Andrew’s mum has just turned 102 years old, but has recently been laid low with a cut on her leg which is refusing to heal.  The car (new to us, because the old one decided 250,000 miles was enough) already knows its own way to Sheffield and back.

We’ve lost family members to cancer this year, about which enough said.  As soon as I can walk more than a mile without crying we’ll be back on the Cancer Research fund raising trail.  

…convinced that cooking and crafting days would begin by Easter, because the kitchen was finally finished, the flours and sugars had arrived, I had 20 kilos of yeast and the sun was shining.

Well, gosh.  So Covid got in the way of all that, and I began using the various flours and sugars and yeasts to make cakes and bread for friends and neighbours – no one else had any flour (or toilet roll…). 

Now I make nothing.  Everyone is on a diet, and the last thing they want is a basket of calories, no matter how lovingly prepared.  We are both dieting as well – BBC news said that, on average, everyone had put on 2lb per month during lockdown.  Well, it turns out that we are blissfully average, and are now trying to shift the 24lbs that went on oh so easily.  

I check in with the sourdough starters every now and again, and they just glare at me from the bottom of the fridge.  It will be so good to get them out and get them going again, and for making sourdough bread to be a fun thing to do with other people, rather than the slowest possible distraction during a pandemic.

Non-essential shops being closed has been more awkward than I’d thought – Amazon has everything, right?  Except it turns out that I need to see and handle the fabric or yarn before I buy it.  So the fabric shop in Thirsk will be the first place I visit on Monday the 12th and I cannot wait.  

The Lodge is ready, and has been since November.  Forlorn and empty, but cosy and warm.  We took the chance to re-lay the bathroom floor (and then spent 3 weeks dusting, dusting and dusting again).  We are just so happy to be getting ready for our first visitors this year.  As much as anything it’s good to have a reason to finish a job, to get organised again, to have deadlines and a structure to the day.  The biggest, biggest, best by far part of reopening will be seeing real people smile and having a chat.  Simple things that we’ve missed so much.

And I really don’t care if our visitors are dieting – they’re also on holiday.  And I need to be making cake.

Well, gosh.

COVID-19 happened, just as we were getting the kitchen ready for teaching baking days…  

Our long-stay (in-between houses) guests left in February, and in March we welcomed visitors from Italy who found themselves unable to go back home because of the travel restrictions.  Both needed to shield (age, health) while here, waiting for permissions to travel (by car) across France and home to Italy.  We managed a VE day celebration in the drive – distancing with our only neighbours – so that was fun.  

But it has been odd, to say the least.

I think I was the only person on the planet with any flour (because I buy in bulk, for teaching) or yeast (ditto).  So we made bread and cakes for our friends and neighbours (and guests!), which kept us sane until the golf courses opened again, at which point Andrew regained all his lost equanimity and my days became more normal!

The rush to the Dales hasn’t happened yet – so we still have loads of availability.  We’ve prepared the holiday let in accordance with the guidance, but, to be honest, we’re happy to be watching and waiting to see how things unfold. 

I think it’s going to be an odd time for quite a while.

… and there is a tiny tree in the Lodge.  With fairy lights.  In our house we have brick dust and banter.  The builders do stuff and we stay out of the way.  It will be finished for Christmas.  We keep the faith.

The Lodge is home at present to a couple who are between houses.  Their old house is sold, the new house has no kitchen.  The same builder is doing our kitchen and theirs – you couldn’t make this up.

Anyway, living in the Lodge seems to be going OK…  When I put measuring spoons and electronic scales in the kitchenette I didn’t really think anyone would be doing actual baking while on holiday, but there is real cooking going on.  

So our guests have become neighbours, too, and it’s been lovely.  The same day laundry service we provide has been more like first thing tomorrow laundry (the builders keep turning the water off), but it’s good to know we’re helping fellow travellers on the journey to kitchen perfection!

We said goodbye to our guest from Kent on Saturday – he had been out taking (wonderful) photos all week.  What a shame the weather wasn’t kinder – today the Dale is bright, white, crisp and clear.  There’s a sprinkling of snow on the tops and it’s beginning to feel a lot like winter.  

There’s no one in the Lodge this week, which has turned out quite handy.  The kitchen in the house (I know, I know) is now devoid of everything except the sink, and the sink is going today (plumbers willing).  So having the luxury of a spare kitchen is – well – a luxury.

An emergency meant I had to shove the ready-to-bake dough in the fridge.  When I got back the Dutch Oven was still red hot in the Aga, and I was in a (different) hurry, so I just turned the loaf out of the banneton and baked it.  Could have been worse.  (It tastes great, which is, I suppose, the main thing).  Fortunately, I’d made the cake and bread for this week’s guests earlier, before the day began unravelling…😊

Gosh, today we welcomed our fourth guests, so I think we should just stop counting and get on with it.  We have three lovely entries in the guest book (the lemon cake seems to go down really well!) and a booking for next April, so we must be doing something right.

I’ve been remiss in bringing the news – I’ve been stripping the old (very old) ghastly wallpaper, filling the big (very big) holes and painting the uneven (very uneven) walls.

We are getting ready for the builders.  Our kitchen is a shambles.   It seems we need a new doorway and door because the old one is holding the house up without a lintel…

It transpires we also need a new window – the one over the sink is ten centimetres too low.  Whoever put the last kitchen in cut the legs off the units to make them fit under the window, so the new units won’t fit!!  Don’t ask why I hadn’t clocked that (we have been here for three years, after all).  The budget has gone out of the window, but I’ll just keep saying “it will be lovely when it’s finished”.   The builders say it will be finished in time for Christmas.  Watch this space.

We won.  No one more surprised than us.  And the beer was gorgeous.  Obviously.

Well, it was nowhere near as stressful as I had imagined, made much easier, no doubt, by the fact that our first guest was lovely.  I hadn’t put a page in the Welcome Pack about managing the Sky or Netflix bits of the TV – this is where you need someone to tell you that things you never think about aren’t necessarily second nature to others.  So I did that.  Then we had thunderstorms, which knocked the Sky about a bit, but only for a few minutes.

The week was the hottest since the planet cooled, so the fact that the instructions for the heating were also missing at the beginning of the week didn’t cause a problem.

The bread and cake in the Welcome pack got eaten, but we hadn’t considered, when filling the tea and coffee jars, that some guests prefer decaffeinated.  So we’ve added those to the back of the cupboard just in case.  The Prosecco remained unopened – so I need to think of something equally welcoming but non-alcoholic for guests who don’t indulge. 

My husband had “borrowed” the squeezy mayonnaise from the Lodge before the grand opening.  There were words.  That’s all I’m saying.

The cleaning went well, too.  Turning the Lodge round in 5 hours won’t be a problem, which means that we can probably be even more flexible with arrival times if we need to. 

The thank you card and bottle of wine when our guest left were lovely surprises, leaving us thinking that we might just get the hang of this eventually.

Well, I suppose this is what first days and first guests are for – to find out what we haven’t thought through.

So yesterday Andrew discovered that the pans which (almost) definitely said “induction” on the label most definitely didn’t induce anything.  New pans, hastily, but nicer, which is a plus.

Then our first guest arrived, and it transpired that even though I had been at pains to include instructions for using every last little bit of equipment, I had failed signally to explain the heating controls or the dustbin days.  Just quite important…

That page is now written and will get handed to guests on arrival – or be somewhere prominent if we aren’t here to welcome.  There is, in our experience, nothing worse than arriving at your holiday let to find you’ve no idea how to heat the place up.  Quickly.  And lighting a fire is not quick.

Tidying out the old summerhouse for use as a utility for the Lodge has produced some large spiders – all now relocated into the orchard.  The freezer looks very well, humming away quietly to itself.  Now that there is electricity we can expand into boot warmers and a fan heater to dry coats.  One day we hope to have a washer/dryer in there, but finding where the water pipe runs is proving problematic.  Then we have to dig another soakaway.  I’m hoping that when the builders are up to their eyes in kitchen-related problems I can divert them with an interesting conundrum – find the missing water…

Further to my last post – which may have sounded like the builders were still toiling away in the Lodge – we are also in the process of making a kitchen in our house.  The dividing wall is down and the floor has been remade, the Aga is installed and working.  It feels like the big stuff is now done.  All that remains (!) is to rip the old units out, build a new skin on the outer wall, paint and decorate, electrify everywhere and put the new units in.  And other things.  Simples.  We do like the builders – they’re now like family.  I make them cake – it seems to help.

I decided that a small chest freezer in the little shed outside the Lodge would be useful, so AO are going to deliver one soon.  Again there have been differing opinions, but I went with my own instinct.  Perhaps not many guests will want to have a week’s supply of pizza and/or chips delivered, but for the one that does, we will be ready. ☺️

But this time the sun shines all day.  The website begins to look more informative, and to give a more rounded look at the Lodge than the agents can.  It will be good to hear back from our guests (when we have some!) about what more we can say on the website or provide in the Lodge.

It was great to find our Quality Assessment Report in the inbox today – and to be told we have a Visit England 4 star self catering rating.  All that shopping and sorting was worth it!

This is the rags to riches story of Fieldfare Lodge, from a “bedsit” (draughty, dirty) and car port to the holiday let annexe it is today.  Our builders (Acton and Mudd) and Plumbers (Mike Percival) and Electrician (Gerald Scott) turned a junkyard into a little jewel, and we cannot thank them enough.

Click on any photo to start the show!