Day 58 - When Foxie built more mountains! (or the great de-greasing!)

It was a misty start to they day on site today and we had bigger numbers of volunteers again as we count down the final hours until we welcome our first event guests on site tomorrow for the 24-Hour Sing fundraising event!

We're pleased to say that the new padlock played nicely, so everyone was in and out without difficulty.  We had Volunteers Gill and Peter carefully cleaning all of the lighting covers in The Lodge after we looked up and realised we had more spiders to evict before we welcome our first guests.  Volunteers Rachel and Alex were identifying drains for us on the scavenger hunt assigned to them for the day and then assisting with cleaning up following the painting in The Lodge.  The cupboard doors for the kitchen were inspected following their final varnishing ready to be reinstalled!

We had our fire alarm provider on site this morning and our security engineer for various different jobs - a busy day in the office - and Alison and Viv were reconciling bookings payments this afternoon.  We're pleased to see bookings are still coming in daily but we'll be releasing some advertising soon for our supporters to help us with telling everyone what we have to offer.  Offsite, we've got people planning our next fundraisers and onsite events, the next of which is our Barn Dance in The Barn in March (tickets available now!).

We had a great team (see photographs) in Foxlease House today and they worked hard to clean the room many of you will know as Wiltshire and prepare it to allow them to build a new mountain range out of the soft furnishings from some of the Foxlease House Rooms so that we can assess them, prepare them for washing and rehanging at the appropriate time.  For now, removing them will help us reduce and avoid any damp in those rooms to mean our dehumidifiers at work are effective, and they will also help us avoid mould and the prospect of damage to soft furnishings with any decorating or repair works.  A successful day's work for us and they really have moved mountains!  They also found some ladybirds who have taken up occupation during the site's closure who have been carefully evicted (see photo).

Elsewhere in Foxlease House, Volunteers Alison and Sandra, on Day 4 of their battle with the dining room and service area this week, were on to serious de-greasing and deep cleaning in there.  Alison temporarily re-located to the hot water supply in the Site Office to make the task easier and as you can see, but the time she was finished Foxie could slide off any surface! 

In other exciting, and yet to be revealed news, our friends at Sign-It did us a rush order job on a new sign for inside The Lodge and came to instal it - we're looking forward to sharing that tomorrow.

Finishing touches to The Lodge tomorrow morning before our first guests in the evening, Love Foxie x