April 6, 2005
Hello again…
Kim has been too busy to write in our joint blog so it’s up to me to fill the void on the internet.
As I refered to in the previous posting, we expanded the business into the Winter. To do this, we had to do a million things. Our property has a great house on it, built by William Vanderbuilt as his country house, and later turned into an inn. On this property are the Cottages and the Carriage House. The Cottages are new construction and are insulated and have heat. The Carriage House was not. So, Kim and I spent the last three month and lots of money insulating the Carriage House, putting in central heating, and, this is amazing, having a driller come out and drill from one side of our property, 8 feet under our wide creek and come up inside the house, so that we may bury our water lines and have insulated water.
We had a multidirectional drill here, a large rig, drilling from one side of our property, accross our stream, to the other side, central heating, lots of work, the place has been swamped with construction workers, and in the midst of all this chaos, we have to get ready for our first season.
What does it mean to “get ready for season”? Well, we have to continue our marketing, our web marketing, lining up Winter art workshop instructors for 2006 including the fiber artists, 2007 instructors and yes, even 2008 instructors but because of our expanded season, we have to line up not just 24 classes but 39. Six Winter Landscape Workshops and nine Fiber Art Workshops as well as our twenty-four legacy Art Workshops that we bought with the inn. (Check out our 2005 line up, too!!!!)
On top of this, we process incoming enrollments, inn guest (we closed for April because there was just too much to do), Kim has to run the office, front and back, I have to get the menus prepared, practice dishes, go to wine tastings (hey, someone has to do it ;), I recently went to a great Burgundy tasting, red and white, and then create a wine menu, pair dishes with wine, keep the kitchen, the house, the grounds, the dog clean and fix the hundred and one things that always need to be fixed while moving forward to the start of the season. Kim is head of housekeeping. I’m head of the kitchen, actually Chef de Cuisine,
The staff is cleaning like mad as the driller drills and the backhoe digs and all this while the water and electricity is shut down.
Whew! What a blast! 🙂
Inn joke for next post: our company is called Woodchuck Ventures, Inc. because Kim loves woodchucks and squirrels and, you get the picture..