Holiday rental in France -the changeover challenge

When you arrive at your holiday rental and see it sparkling and in pristine condition, you often forget that a small army of people have been in cleaning, washing, changing and checking…… and rechecking that everything is just so for your arrival. Well when I say small army, what I really mean is Graham and myself…. I mean how hard can it be to get a three bedroomed, three bathroomed house ready for guests arriving?  

We waved goodbye to our previous guests as if we had all the time in the world and then dashed back to the house where the to do list awaited and the Innes duo kicked into action like a well oiled machine – or perhaps a machine in need of oiling!  I like making lists so every little thing that needed to be done was on that list, however timings were not – must remember timings in future for a list without timings is like a restaurant menu without prices.

Battle commenced as the beds were stripped, the washing was stacked in piles to go into the machine, the rooms were hoovered, bathrooms cleaned, pool and garden cleaned, sun loungers washed and as each task was completed, it was ticked off the list – simples.  Everything was going ok but it does get to the point where you realise that the time you have left is not going to be long enough to complete everything on the list and everything on the list needs to be done – oh yes and it’s 40 degrees!

I discovered that “non iron” bedding doesn’t actually mean what it says on the packet.  In fact it should read “iron but not quite as much as you would normally” – however this title isn’t quite so catchy as the two words that were plastered all over the packaging and bore no resemblance to the two words I was muttering as I had to iron the super king size sheets that felt the size of a football pitch once they were resting on the ironing board.

It’s that moment when you have to pick up the pace and of course a by product of this is that you end up making mistakes and the heat makes you a little, shall we say, tetchy with each other.  We managed to drop a jar of jam which smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor and we spent what felt like an eternity clearing up tiny shards of glass and chunks of sticky jam from the already cleaned cream tiled floor.  The upside was that the whole kitchen did smell nice – a combination of pine floor cleaner and strawberries – lovely!

Although we had been drinking lots of water all day, there comes a point when you need to add a bit more flavour to it.  Graham found some raspberry lemonade in the fridge and half filled a pint glass then topped it up with fizzy water.  He took a few large gulps to quench his thirst and I did the same only to realise that the raspberry lemonade was cunningly disguised as homemade sloe gin!  We both burst out laughing – It did taste nice but it didn’t really increase efficiency or output – however we did feel a bit more relaxed.

We did manage to get all the important things done on the list and hopefully when our new guests arrived they were impressed by the place and didn’t notice so much the owners who looked like they had been working out at the gym and smelling of gin!