1/10/17: Catching a Breath

This was our 10th morning as the sole innkeepers of the Bernerhof, and we finally have a minute to catch our breath.  Carla just left to find a small storage unit for our outdoor/camping stuff and empty plastic bins.  She will also pick up the few groceries we need for breakfast tomorrow and a couple of around the inn repair items.  I am settled into our desk to start to make some sense out of the pile of receipts that I have accumulated for RC Hospitality LLC (since mid-December) and Bernerhof Inn Corporation (since January 1).  This is the first minute that I have had to do any bookwork.  I feel desperate to get caught up.  I think it will take all day today and maybe part of tomorrow to get it all done to my satisfaction.

We only had one couple spend the night last night, Nick and Val.  They are skiers and are spending the week here skiing all of the local mountains.  We will be slow all week, with one couple checking in tonight for a one nights stay and another couple checking in Thursday night.  Friday night, we will have 6 check ins and we have a full house Saturday and Sunday nights.  We've been told that the winter will be that way, slow during the week and full on weekends. 

Our heads were swimming when Steve was here with everything he was trying to teach us.  It was too much too fast, but now that he is gone and we are actually doing everything, it is starting to make sense.  We are starting to feel like we belong in this old Inn and it no longer feels completely foreign.  Steve was great to learn from, in many respects, but it was a difficult 12 days because there were things we knew we were going to do differently, yet we had to do them his way while he was here.  We are excited to be doing all of our baking from scratch, for example.  I can finally say that I am a biscuit maker.  After experimenting with several recipes, I have found one that I can consistently bake with good results.  Carla's gingerbread scones, yesterday morning, were a big hit! We are also baking all of our own cookies and making our buttermilk pancakes from scratch.  The guests seems to appreciate our efforts!

We've spent our first week as innkeepers cleaning, organizing, throwing things away, and storing things in the basement.  We attacked the kitchen first, anxious to get it clean and organize it in a way that it makes sense for us.  Dick Badger, the owner of the Bernerhof, agreed to hire Service Masters to come in and do a deep clean of the Inn.  They have finished with all the rooms and the common areas and they are finishing the kitchen today.  We are so relieved to have three years of grime removed from the surface of everything.  The Inn already seems so much brighter and  welcoming just with the deep cleaning.  Next up is all the minor repairs.  Kenny is working through our punch list.  High priority is a new mattress for a couple of the rooms.  We hope to have those here by Friday.  I will follow up with Dick on that this afternoon.  We also ordered new towels, which we hope to have here this week, as the towels are getting frayed and stained and we don't have enough of them.  Our bathroom amenities (shampoo, conditioner, soap, etc) will be here Thursday.  So many things were allowed to run out as Steve was wrapping up his tenure that Carla and I have had to scramble to make sure we have everything we need to take care of our guests.

We had an exciting night Saturday night.  In addition to the normal excitement of a full house on a night that we serve dinner and the bar is open, we had repairmen in the kitchen looking for the source of the cold air that freezes our pipes on sub-zero days, and several appointments scheduled in our spa.  During the middle of it all, a couple asked for an iron.  As soon as they plugged it in, they flipped a circuit breaker and Carla and I headed to the basement to find the breaker box and try to get the power back to their room.  There is one breaker box in the massage room of the spa, where there was a couples massage in progress.  Of course, that's the breaker that flipped!  So our guests were in the dark, quite literally, until the massage was done and we could get into that massage studio.  Luckily for us and them, they were in a suite and only one of the rooms went dark.  They were still able to get ready for their night out and we had their power back on before they got back from dinner.  Later in the evening a gentleman came to the front desk to let us know that his door would not latch.  I thought to myself, "No way, I haven't had any complaints about that yet, surely the door latches."  But it didn't because the latch didn't line up properly with the strike plate.  It was my good fortune that my partner Carla has some woodworking tools and I was able to chisel out a bigger hole and lower the strike plate so it would latch, all with the guests looking on.

And I gotta go.  Too many interruptions.  More later.