Day 60 - The day prep for the camping season began (or when Foxie joined the 24-Hour Sing!)

An early start to the day for some of our volunteers today, but nowhere near as early as our fundraising champions the 24-Hour Singers and their support crew. Our volunteer coordinators today stopped in to listen first thing before the volunteers arrived and it was fab.

First to arrive of the volunteers was our magician electrician and his canine electrician's mate, Bella, who was exceptionally well-behaved during her time on site. We can't typically manage canine volunteers but it meant our volunteer electrician could give us his time so we made an exception. He PAT tested all day for us and got lots more ticked off of our list in the main buildings, for which we are very grateful.

We had Volunteer Jean, our expert draper, on site pressing the curtains for The Barn all day for us ready to be re-hung when The Barn is ready for that and we understand there's only two to go, meaning we can start laundering more from elsewhere when the next batch of pressed curtains are moved out of the upstairs room soon.

Our other two teams of Volunteers today achieved great things for us in different areas of the site. Volunteers Fiona, Immi, Alison and Emma managed to lift all remaining glued carpet in The Gatehouse - through serious determination, arm strength and elbow grease - in just the morning's work. We asked them to progress as a much as they could without overdoing it but when they came to report back we weren't expecting them to tell us they'd managed it ALL! It's absolutely amazing progress which set us up for more flooring to be laid next week. To try to give them an easier afternoon, after they had had a break for lunch and a stop in to see our on site singers for a while, they assessed the state of the changing rooms for us and inventoried the work yet to be done and then moved on to assessing and starting very preliminary cleaning to a couple of our camp site huts.

Our other team on site, Volunteers Becky, Gill and Geoff, spent the day working hard to assess and start repairs to the campsite huts on Oaks and North Meadows and they made great progress with the guttering cleared and necessary repairs to it identified; moss removal on the roofs, cleaning of the hard standing around the huts, with all edges cut back. The huts were swept out and all areas checked and inventoried to let us make the necessary additions to Foxie's Wishlist, which we'll be doing over the next few days. Our campsite huts still need work but it's a fantastic start to getting the first of them up together for us and ready for our early campsite bookings and they did an amazing job.

Once the day volunteers had left and our deliveries arrived, those of us in the Site Office paused paperwork (which we could keep doing forever) and went up to sit in with our fantastic fundraisers for their last hour of their 24-hour marathon (Foxie spent considerably more time up there today and made a number of friends - see photos of Foxie meeting Cadi and enjoying a waltz). Finishing with "To Foxlease we'll always come home" was such an enthusiastic end to the fantastic first event on site and great to have the feedback from those who stayed on the current state of The Lodge! We hope they'll now treat themselves to a well-deserved rest.

Paperwork and grant applications all round tomorrow and planning for next week, Love Foxie x