Rotten decking

For those of you who have been following our Blips for a while........................ you will know that we have a very lovely south facing sun terrace at our St Ives home, which has decking in one corner, so that Ann can sit and drink wine and look at the lovely view.

When we were here in October, Ann noticed that part of the decking was starting to sag when she stood on it and she didn't think she'd put on that much weight. Lol! Amazingly the decking was built in 2003, so it's done really well to have lasted 20 years. Anyway, the plan was to renew it in the Spring, ie April, but having stood on it a few times in the last few weeks, obviously it's not been warm enough for her to sit out there drinking wine she decided that we'd better get it sorted sooner rather than later.

Because we rent out our home when we're not here, everything has to be in tiptop condition. If it had just been myself & Ann using the house then obv we would have left it until later. But we rent out our house because something has to pay for my treats and you can guarantee that if we took a booking and requested that the visitor didn't use the decking for H&S reasons; they would say that, that was the only reason they'd booked it, even though anyone would be mad to go out there in the weather that we've had recently, and demand money off. Or worse still, we'd take a booking from a big, fat, heavy person, who would go on the decking and fall through it!!! ,.............And then sue us!!!

Oh and just to digress................... we have a hanging egg chair in our living room and it has a weight limit of 18 stone. We have a note in our information folder to say this but nobody reads information folders. Obviously when people book, Ann doesn't ask them how much they weigh, but two of the 'latticey bits on the egg' (don't know how else to describe them) are broken, so somebody's obv been too heavy for it. It's like when people come on holiday, they leave their brains behind. Our kitchen work surface is covered in scratches because visitors seem to think that they don't need to use a chopping board. Would they do this at home? Who knows??

Anyway.................... to get back to the rotten decking................... the very lovely Juozas came round yesterday, looked at the decking and said he'd have to come back today, to pull some of it up, to see if it needed to be completely replaced or just have the 'struts' replaced. We LOVE Juozas. Arrived at 10am on the dot, pulled some of it up, and it was very, very, rotten, so off he went to get some new wooden struts, came back, I kept trying to lick him when he was working and do you know what......... he didn't mind because he said he had a very licky sausage dog/staffie cross that does the same thing?!! I went out for a walk for 1.5 hours and when we came back, he'd pretty much finished. How fabulous is that?

Thank you Juozas. You're a STAR!!!

All we need now are a few more bookings, otherwise I might have to cut back on my treats.

If anyone fancies a little winter break in St Ives, check out our home 
here.

Toodles. xx