Day 44 -An alarmingly loud day for Foxie and the volunteers! (or when Foxie met Colin).

It was a big numbers day on site today and we had a family group volunteering together to celebrate Volunteer Alison's special birthday - we were privileged that she chose to spend her special day working hard for us at Foxlease Park and her family team managed lots of outside jobs for us - moving piles of garden waste around, tidying up the main roadway up to the lodge and cutting in some more drainage, as well as making a visit to scope out the work needed to our Main Campfire Circle. They also took this beautiful photo of it this afternoon with the sun (first time we've seen it on site in a while) peeking through the trees. The good news is there isn't too much generally to be done to make the Campfire Circle useable, the bad news is that what is to be done is substantial in that it requires works to reinstate and/or replace the seating there. It's on the list as a special project as unfortunately it's likely to be expensive to make it properly safe and shored up to use anything above ground level but, s'mores are high on our list of 2025 targets, as are campfires, and so we'll be thinking about how we might be able to fund that soon.

Alongside the birthday celebrations, during which Foxie met both Alison and Colin (the caterpillar cake) we had lots of other volunteers on site today too. We had groups working hard checking the status of ceiling tiles and polyfila repairs in The Lodge and continuing the pressure washing progress outside, as well as tackling the second deep clean of the kitchens in The Lodge.

We had our team of curtain experts working upstairs above the Site Office in Foxlease House today to repair and re-hook a number of sets of curtains and to play the curtain matching game with us to try to ensure we know what goes with what and where - despite careful labelling, we seem to have ended up with some extras...we're not entirely sure how.

The alarming part of the day was the significant fire alarm call point testing which Emma and Alison started this morning. Up until now our regular testing has been completed by expert volunteers Peter and Gill but, as they weren't there today, it was time for some others to take up the baton and the results were initially very good and then....noisy....and noisier....as the second type of call point (as no two things at Foxlease Park can ever be the same) was a little more challenging and the key instructions were...invisible. The excellent concluding news to share being that the call points all work fine and YouTube has some exceptionally useful "how-to" videos, for which Emma and Alison (and also Paul who was drafted in to add a third brain to the mix after ten minutes of silencing the alarm and one phone call to Peter and Gill) were very grateful. All three are now pro's and will be exercising their new skills regularly to keep us up to date.

We had another group of volunteers who sorted out The Laundry for us and removed some of the things which were causing offence to the Singing Washing Machine (it likes its space uninterrupted) to alternative storage locations. They also topped up the magic potions (refillable cleaning products) for us. Then they went on a hunt around the site to try to update our ladder register, which was a little less successful as the Foxlease Park ladders have a mind of their own and it's hard to check things when people are trying to use them and keep moving them to other places on site. They achieved the labelling and recording of half of them and more to go tomorrow. They did take a fabulous, updated set of photographs on one of their breaks of Mt. Duvet and Mt. Pillow, climbed by the expert Foxie's crew (for scale) as they felt the original photographs last week didn't really capture the altitude correctly.

They also relocated four better mattresses to be installed in The Accessible Suite tomorrow which are currently lining the corridor ready for installation, for which our volunteers' spines will be grateful. In other news we've booked in Baby Skip's exit and replacement for tomorrow too.

Moving mountains and mattresses tomorrow, Love Foxie x