Saturday 29 August 2020

Another guest surprise.

 We have just left the cottage after cleaning ready for the next guest. We happened to move the folding dining table in the kitchen. One of the leg gates fell off when we moved the table. It had been broken and not reported by previous guests. Fortunately we have a couple of days to effect a repair to the table and I possess the appropriate tools, materials, and skills, but the situation would have been worse if we'd left  the cleaning process until just before the arrival of the next guests.

This is quite a robust table, but the breakage had been deliberately hidden. It would have required quite a lot of force to break the joints and cause the damage we discovered. These guests had the front to say in a review that our cottage  on-line photo's needed to be updated.

One further reason to increase rental prices to cover the cost of repairs. 

Repairing kitchen table in cottage
The repair in progress.

The repair entailed drilling out broken wooden dowels, to an accuracy of better than 0.5 mm, and replacing them. One of the wooden stretchers was badly cracked and needed gluing and clamping. We took the opportunity to disassemble the gate leg of the table, and reglue the entire assembly. We clamped it with a jury-rigged tape Spanish windlass.

Table upside down on kitchen floor, glued and clamped.

Edit: 01/09/2020
After repairing the kitchen table yesterday, we noticed that one of the kitchen chairs was also damaged. It was pulling apart at the top and bottom of the chair frame. We couldn't get back to the cottage until today with the tools to fix it, so I went back to the cottage again this morning with some tools and glue for a swift repair. The next guests are due at 3pm today.



Whoever caused the damage they've been abusive to the furniture. The chair have served well for six years without previous damage. I inspected all of the chairs and only one was showing damage.



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