So – it’s been a
while. But I am back to announce: Poppy is
open for 2016 season – our nineteenth!
It’s been a strange one
so far. Bookings have obviously been
affected by the state of the world and bad publicity about Turkey. In addition, it took us until March to get
most of last year’s money from one of the agencies and all that time we were
worried that they could go bust and we wouldn’t see it at all. With this in mind, we held off doing much
work on the hotel.
In the last month,
though, bookings have picked up a bit and we started what we thought would be a
couple of smallish projects which have turned into much larger ones. They have also been rather last minute ones,
so last weekend we had about 12 workmen in the hotel – painters, tilers, a man
laying stones in the garden, another checking all the windows and doors – as well
as the boys cleaning the newly-grouted pool and the poor cleaners trying to
clean and keep everyone out of the rooms they had done! My job was to feed the masses – and to keep
them all in tea (no mean feat with Turkish people!)
One of the major jobs was
the garden where enlarging the drainage channel ended up involving a JCB, a
lorry-load of stones and another of soil.
It still isn’t finished, or even at the stage where I can do the nice
bit of buying some new plants, but it is looking a lot better than it was!
The painting of a few
rooms turned into painting of all rooms, plus the outside of the building at
ground floor level all the way round.
The painters have been working at night sometimes – at this time of year
they are cramming in all the work they can get before the summer building ban
puts a stop to it – and they go home.
Ours were all young Kurdish men from the east of Turkey. We have also had quite a few Syrian workers.
I have had new tables
made for the ground floor balconies – and the boys are busy as I write sanding
some chairs to go with them. I have also
changed some of the living room sofa-beds which were getting a bit
uncomfortable and bought a new settee for the bar (which I am battling Poppy
the cat for ownership of!)
And if you want to know
what else we have done…..you will have to come and see!
By the way, the weather
has been completely mad, switching from hail storms, thunder and lightning to
bright sunshine in half an hour. It
always seems to do that as soon as we fill the pool. The first hardies have actually been into the
pool, though you won’t catch me in there until …oh about July!
