304 of 365 of What it is Like to Run a Resort

Friday, May 13, 2011
The picture is of the finished Birch flooring. I put the final coat on Thursday. It is so cold out today that the floor isn't drying well. At least there will be enough coats on it, regardless if it is drying shiny or dull. It looks like half is shiny and the last half I did is dull. I guess it got pretty cold at the end of the project and it won't shine but with all the furniture that we will be putting on it (a week from now), you'll hardly be able to tell anyway.

The cleaning girls are coming at noon. So I went into Cedar and turned on the hot water. Then I realized it will need some space heaters since it was only 42 degrees. So I found one in the basement and took it upstairs to try it first. I didn't want to burn down the cabin so I tried it where I could watch it for awhile. It worked fine and then I took it up to Cedar, plugged it in and nervously left. The girls arrived on time and went to work.

When I went to pull the Chrysler down to the basement to load all the cleaning supplies in it, the lever wouldn't go into reverse. Finally it slammed into reverse and every time I tried to pull the lever to get it to do it again, it made a hard click too. When I dropped off the cleaning supplies into Alder after the girls were gone, the lever almost came completely off. Yikes. I hope we won't have car troubles now.

I went into the basement and made the bags up for Cedar of all the clean laundry. It was always fun to get out all the quilts I sewed and curtains, etc. for the cabins again.

Cedar looks great. The girls all had to leave after that was done, but that's okay. The beds are all made and it looks so nice all ready for renters. The smell of soap and cleaner is so much nicer than stale air.

I went down to the basement area and put all the dahlias back into the safety of the basement. They had been outside and it wasn't getting any warmer. In fact, it was now 40 degrees. So since they are fair weather plants, I had to be careful.

I moved some furniture back into Alder and then while John was fixing a couple small drips in the plumbing, I waited around for him to help with moving the heavy furniture. The leaks took so long, I got crabby. I shouldn't have waited for him so long. So I left and made dinner.

Some other things we did during the day were John drove to the bank and hardware store, he did a lot of paperwork, we moved a television into Aspen, got another television ready to move into Spruce, I did some computer work and paperwork, and John finished hooking up the pipes for Hemlock. We got an old rug unrolled from the basement and laid it outside on the asphalt to lie flat and air out. In a week we will put it in Birch.

We also tried and failed to turn on the water to the Balsam cabin. I was in the well pump house and John was up at the cabin where he had hooked up the pipes earlier. He said to flip the switch. So I turned on the water for Balsam, walked outside and checked the well box for leaking and none was evident so I walked up to Balsam. John and I walked around and checked and everything seemed to be fine. John stayed up there to turn on the hot water heater and I went back down the hill. That's when I saw it. Water was shooting out the back of the Birch cabin. So I ran into the pump house and turned off the water. Then I came out, yelled up to John what was happening, and we spent the next hour mopping up water in Birch's kitchen. Luckily nothing happened to the newly varnished floor. This kind of stuff happens some times. It was not a great day but there weren't any disasters that couldn't be fixed.