Carpet Cleaning

As I type I am sitting in the holiday cottage. All the doors and windows are open, even though it is only 3 deg C outside. It is time for the carpets to be professionally cleaned. Once or twice a year we employ a carpet cleaning specialist to steam and wash the all of the carpets in the cottage. He has a big noisy machine, lots of water and pipes around the house.  We deliberately chose polypropylene carpets to allow this routine cleaning. They have good stain rejection and dry quite quickly without any shrinkage. You can guarantee the water in his machine will be dark and muddy by the time he completes his work.

In addition to the charge from the cleaning company (£75), it raises an additional cost because we cannot accept guests during the week of the cleaning. This time we had to turn down someone wanting to rent the cottage for seven nights.

Managing the Network in Holiday Cottage

Our holiday cottage is in the middle of a short Victorian terrace row of houses. It is located in the town of Wirksworth, an old lead and limestone mining town. Originally it had two bedrooms, with no bathroom in the building. The toilet was in an outhouse and the occupants would bath in a tin bath in the kitchen. We've since converted one of the bedrooms into a bathroom.  

One other feature demanded by our guests in the cottage is a good Broadband Internet connection. It is generally one of the first questions we're asked when guests arrive: "What's the WiFi password?" Indeed we've had some guests who spend most of their stay on the settee in the cottage playing network computer games. We installed a business quality ADSL Broadband service with a WiFi service in the house delivered from the ISP Router. Usage is unlimited and the average top speed is 18 mbps download and 1mbps upload. The business service option costs more, but gives me a better service level in the event of faults.

One of the adjoining houses does not have their own internet connection and a limited income, so as a courtesy, a few months ago we allowed them to hook into our WiFi service free of charge. In general this does not generate any additional costs to us, but potentially reduces slightly the WiFi capacity available to our paying guests.

As a general upgrade I've recently signed up to a Plusnet partial fibre "SuperFast" broadband service (FTTC / VDSL). This has become available over the past couple of years. At our location this should give an Internet speed of 75 mbps download and a much faster upload (20 mbps) to our guests. However it does give rise to another potential issue. I don't want our neighbours to gain access to the faster service. To control this external access I've turned off the ISP WiFi on their router and installed a Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite  network access point to provide WiFi in the cottage. It is powered by Power Over Ethernet (POE) so needs only a single network cable from the ISP Router to the Ubiquiti access point unit on the wall. This POE method simplifies the cabling for the new unit.

The Ubiquiti device allows you to have up to four WiFi services simultaneously. You can also monitor them remotely and changing the settings on-the-fly without disturbing the holiday cottage guests. 

• I've setup one owner's WiFi band which is password protected and gives unrestricted capacity. 
• A second high speed WiFi band is dedicated for paying guests, and this is protected by a different password. 
• Finally there is a third guest band of WiFi which is open, not protected by password, available for visitors and neighbours. 

This third band is set with usage limits so that paying guests on the main band are not impacted by external usage.  Passwords can be changed remotely (UniFi Cloud service) by me at the start of each new rental via an Internet web page. This is the same type of WiFi system as the ones used in Premier Inn Hotels, except we don't charge our guests extra for the fast service.

The access point comes pre-configured from the supplier. It really is just a plug in and go device. If you want to monitor or alter the configuration it can be done from any web browser. It does help to have some knowledge of network technology if you are planning to tinker. The Ubiquiti devices are good at "mesh" networking if you need to deploy multiple access points, without running network cables, to ensure coverage of your property, but in most cases one unit will service a whole house.

Hooray, good guests!

We had some great guests staying in the cottage this week, we'd love to see them stay again. They were polite, and left the cottage in a clean and tidy state. They didn't complain when the gas supply to the cottage was cut off for 24 hours, leaving them with no cooker, central heating or hot showers.

In fact the gas was cut off to most of the houses in Wirksworth. Some for  as long as four days. A water main burst and injected a lot of water into the gas main. Cadent, the gas network company, has had squads of engineers in town turning off the gas in  the houses while they drain the water out of the gas main. Once a section is clear of water they re-visit the houses to turn on the gas and check appliances are safe.

In the case of the holiday cottage, our guests kindly managed the interaction with Cadent.

Sadly we had to turn down a last minute guest booking from Sykes, because we were not sure whether the cottage would have gas or not. It turned out afterwards that Cadent had been able to restore the gas supply on the eve of the proposed booking. So that cost us a week's rental.

Blocked shower drain

When we refurbished the cottage for use as a holiday cottage we had a new bathroom built. Part of that is a shower cubicle. The house is relatively small and not much room for drainage pipes underfloor for the shower. To reduce the amount of cutting into floor joists our plumber, unbeknown to us, had used small diameter plastic pipes. So the shower drains okay under normal usage, but it is easily blocked by foreign objects.  Our guests tend not to tell us if they've (partially) blocked the drains and leave it for the next guests to find.

Now, whenever we "turn around" the cottage after a rental period we try to check everything is working properly. We have a couple of hours to clean and check the whole house from top to bottom. One of those checks is to check the shower drain is working okay. In fact we always bring a plumbers plunger with us as part of our cottage cleaning kit. If there's the slightest hint of a slow draining on the shower, it is time to get the plunger out and give the shower drain a good work over with the plunger. This time around we found the plastic cover for a razor blade lodged in the drain causing a blockage.

They'd also managed to use spare pre-paid waste sacks at £2.40 a go, by just partially filling the sack we'd provided. The previous set of guests managed to break a drinking glass, for which they'd provided a reasonable replacement, but we found fragments of glass on the kitchen floor. The guests before those were terrible, breaking a pane of glass in the front door, breaking the kitchen waste bin, staining towels and bedding, leaving unwashed dishes. Not long before those guests, a set of guests had showered their dog in the bathroom shower, leaving fur clogging the drains.

Our guests rarely follow the local council rules for putting out rubbish.

What are these people like in their own homes?

Test fitting - replacement pane for front door

I took a trip over to the cottage today to do a test fitting of the replacement pane on the front door and the supporting wooden bead. It went well and everything seems to fit well. Tomorrow, after some clean up work, I'll be setting a putty bed on the door window opening and installing the pane then locking it in place with the wooden beads (and one dozen stainless steel brad nails).

It was a relief, because the four sections of wooden beading had been cut off-site, and it is easy to get that stage wrong. Given the unique pattern of the wooden bead there are 60 ways to get it wrong and only one correct way. The beads are machine cut which pretty much guarantees an accurate 45 degrees mitre joint. If they were cut by hand, you'd have to be sure the angle are correct in eight locations. There's three ways to insert the glass pane wrongly in the door and only one correct one. Thankfully the glazing company has clearly marked the correct orientation.

Is it worth it?

I've just run the annual accounts for 2018 - 2019 for the cottage. Not including our manpower costs in cleaning the cottage and other running around, the profit margins are slim, representing a return of 1.2% on the capital investment. If we took the same capital investment and put it shares we'd see an average return of 4% without having to lift a finger.

Taking account of running costs and assuming a very optimistic 75% occupancy, we have to see a fee of £103 in a week before we've covered operational costs. Bear in mind that the agency takes 25% of the booking (plus an admin fee) of the money paid by our guests. The agency deducts VAT at 20% from the balance it pays us as "income"; so the guest has to pay in the region of £160/week before we see a penny profit. Our multi-room cottage is about half the price of a room at the local Premier Inn.

To cap it all we have to pay income tax on any profit.  So when we have a guest saying we're too expensive or the furnishings need upgrading (hint; they are all less than three years old), we don't take them too seriously.

Protective glazing panel on front door

I've installed a Perspex (Acrylic) panel on the interior of the front door of the cottage. Its purpose is to protect the existing door glazing from the rare, but careless/negligent, actions of guests. A couple of weeks ago, a guest managed to put his fist through one of  the panes and scattered glass across the road outside the house. This is despite there being an inner door to protect the outer door. It's an old door with nine original, but obsolete privacy patterned annealed glass panes covering the upper half.

The acrylic plastic is colourless clear cast and is 6mm thick. It is almost impossible break without tools. I've milled out a solid oak frame, with mitre joints at the corners to hold the acrylic panel in place. The panel covers all of the interior side of the glass. I robustly mounted the panel on Friday morning in time for the arrival of the latest guests in the afternoon. 

Unfortunately, the replacement pane of toughened and patterned glass for the front door is not yet available. It is on special order via a specialist glazier and their supplier has encountered some production problems. So sadly, I've had to tell our new guests, while the front door is now secure there is still an unsightly temporary plastic sheet covering the missing pane. I've had some wooden beading bespoke manufactured to the correct (imperial) dimensions by a local company. The beading will be used to secure the pane when it arrives. The beading is a good match for the old beading which has received some damage. Despite many phone calls, I've not been able to track down a supplier who retails this obsolete wood moulding off the shelf.

I'll be holding discussions as to who pays for remediation of the damage!