Tuesday and Wednesday last week both blessed us with a ‘4-room changeover day’.
What is a 4-room changeover day? Well, it means after getting up around 6:30am to prepare for breakfast, doing a breakfast service for 8 people and cheerfully saying farewell to all our guests, all 4 rooms need to be thoroughly cleaned and made up before mid-afternoon when we merrily start to welcome our next 8 arrivals.
There are 8 king size sheets, 4 duvet covers and 16 pillow-cases to wash, dry and iron plus 16 towels and 4 shower mats to wash and dry. Of course, we also need to keep the rest of the house, pool and garden looking great for our guests, stock up the cupboards for breakfast the following morning and stay on top of the day to day running of things…watering the plants, changing a broken light bulb, recycling, touching up paintwork etc… Doing this for two days running is tough. Perhaps it’s where the ‘Chambres Dôn’t’ joke comes from… Tom and I make a great team though and we keep each other going well when the going gets tough. A big‘respect’ to those that do it on their own!
On Thursday and Friday last week on the other hand, we only had one changeover per day and none on Saturday because all 8 guests were staying for a few nights. So, all our B&B work was done by late morning and we had pretty much of the rest of the day to ourselves (OK there is always SOMETHING that needs doing in a house like this and there is always ironing to do, but you get the idea…) Suddenly it seems like quite an easy way of life.
A few more ‘highs’ that more than offset the ‘lows’ on a typical summer week like last week that come to mind:
- The guests are great, we have met so many different people and, for the most part, they are very happy to be here and leave feeling satisfied which makes me very happy.
- Living here is amazing, last week we had the Oyster and Wine festival in the village, the usual Thursday morning and Tuesday evening markets and live music in the village on Thursday and Friday evenings. Running through countryside, the lovely local community, meeting friends out and about when we are shopping etc…
- We are doing this on our terms. Of course there are the social charges and taxes to pay, but we are working for ourselves and doing this because we choose to. If we decide we want to block some or all the rooms off for a few days, we can and we do.
So, I’m moving into the last two weeks of full season feeling very positive about Le Portanel. We’ve had so many more guests than I was expecting, it has been challenging, a lot of hard work and frustrating at times, but I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m looking forward to a quieter September and an end-of-season celebration in October!