Yet more technology

So we had a machine for processing credit card payments. It was old and slow but it worked. But the display was very faint and I phoned to see if there was some way to make it clearer.

No there wasn’t. We had to get a new one.

So we got a new one and it lasted about two weeks and then broke down.

Last Thursday old technology returned to the Spread in the form of a mechanical card swipe machine and multipart paper forms. The last time I’d used one of these was almost 30 years ago when I worked in a shop. Swiping the card was easy enough, but banking the forms wasn’t. The problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what to do with the various parts of the forms, but hardly anyone at the bank knew either. I’ll find out in a few days if it’s been succesful. Meanwhile…

…the new machine arrived. I tried to take payment using card details supplied by an agency otherwise known as CNP (Cardholder Not Present) and it said “disallowed transaction”.

“Oops, sorry” said Streamline, “problem at this end – someone had forgotten to check a check box”

Then yesterday I tried to take a regular payment with the cardholder present and it didn’t work. Once again a problem at Streamline. Eventually the problem was sorted to the amusement of the customer who turned out to work in banking. The technology side of banking to be exact.

Then yesterday evening I tried another CNP transaction and it said “disallowed transaction” again. Oh deary me (as Frances would say)

Oh, and the new reception area is pretty well set up now. I just need to tweak my booking software to allow printing of the customer’s details and check-in will be a lot quicker.

Overlap

A follow on to yesterday’s post on roofing. I’d thought I knew what was meant by “overlap” on slates, but it turns out I didn’t. Here’s a (rather bad) diagram…

Mind the gap!

I’ve shown the slates slightly transparent so you can see the ones underneath. So, the overlap is the distance between the blue lines – right?

Wrong!

When a roofer talks about overlap he means the distance between the red lines. If it’s too small water can seep under the top slate and over the bottom one. For a roof like ours it should be about 3 inches. It’s actually around 1 inch.

Proving once again that the hospitality industry is unpredictable we’ve just taken in four German bikers at just before 10pm. They’d come from Edinburgh and if we hadn’t had any space it would have been a long ride to the next hotel. 15 for breakfast tomorrow. Eek!

Unplanned maintenance

You’ll have to pay attention here. When we took over the hotel around 5 years ago one of the first things we did was to get part of the roof of the hotel reslated. If you look at the picture of the hotel on the website it’s the roof over the lower bit of the building at the left. Only the back elevation was redone. A firm from Edinburgh did the work. They have since gone bust/changed name/put on black hats and ridden off into the sunset (that last one describes them best if you follow).

X marks the spot

Anyway. A local roofing firm (a good one) came today to do some remedial work on drainpipes, gutters and suchlike and to find the source of a minor leak in the aforementioned roof. The leak turns out to be due to insufficient overlap between the rows of slates and the whole roof will need re-done. This should be causing us to wring our hands in woe, but it isn’t and here’s why…

The roof in question has, like a lot of the Spread been added to over the years and the current arrangement of beams, cross beams, very cross beams and downright furious beams is not particularly satisfactory. When the structural engineer was asked his opinion a few years ago he said “take it off and start again!”

We were already resigned to having to re-jig the roof supports at the back of the building to get enough height to create a bedroom for Frances (this area is to be our quarters you see) and if we’ve to go to the expense of taking off all the slates then we may as well go the whole way and replace the whole roof. That sounds a bit drastic, but I’ve seen what’s up there and you haven’t.

So the plan (and it’s no more than that at this stage) is to replace the roof and create a living room with platform bed in the upper room and a bathroom and Frances’ bedroom in the lower room. Yes, it’s another “watch this space” moment at the Spread Eagle!

Expansion

Good grief – it’s been a while since I posted here. My only excuse is that the hotel has been pleasingly busy and I’ve been occupied with breakfast, cleaning, paperwork, dinners and suchlike.
Planning has started on the next phase of the renovations. What this will entail is not clear at the moment, but at the very least we’re going to convert the two rooms with shared bathroom into ensuites. The current layout is a double room, a single room and a large bathroom next to each other, so converting it ought to be a no-brainer: make the bathroom into a bedroom and convert the single room into two shower rooms. But this being the Spread there’s a complication in the form of a 30cm difference in floor height between the bathroom and the bedrooms. Problems however are there to be solved and we have an architect on board who’s trying to work his way round it.
Other ingredients in phase 4 (or is it 5b?) of the renovations are the upgrading of a derelict split level room to create a bedroom and living room for us and a bedroom for Frances. If this is done it frees up the whole top floor giving space for another three double bedrooms.
I’ll post more on this when we have plans, costings etc. Meanwhile here’s a cute picture of Frances…

Frances shows off her new wheels

Rearranging the furniture

We closed the public bar in November last year due to rising costs and minimal sales. That’s improved the bottom line slightly but leaves us with a problem – some guests like to sit in the bar before or after dinner and now they can’t

The residents’ lounge at the back of the hotel is next door to the function room which, for various reasons has never been used for a function since the renovations were completed. There’s a bar in it though, so a rather obvious thought occurred to us…

The new residents' lounge

Yes, meet the new residents’ lounge! Bigger, brighter and better…

Residents' lounge bar

and it has a bar!

Eagle flaps its wings, squawks a bit.

Dinner yesterday was a little busier than anticipated and this resulted in a bit more last minute prep than I’m comfortable with. We had no salmon cos… someone had forgotten to order it, we had only one sirloin… ditto, there was very little chocolate fudge sauce left for the choc fudge cake…

Today I spent from 10.30 am until around 5 cooking. I made sticky toffee pudding, chocolate fudge cake, chocolate fudge sauce, soup, bread, arrabbiata sauce, various types of pasta, assorted vegetables.

This is just as well because on the stroke of 6pm two parties of four and a party of two arrived causing Megan to panic a little. Lorna helped and everyone got served fine. We ended up with 17 folk mostly residents. Given the size of the dining room that’s about all we can manage unless we do multiple sittings. Our continuing plans for the hotel involve upgrading the top floor to form three double/twin rooms and make rooms 6 and 7 ensuite. That’ll give us a total capacity of around 24 – 26 a good bit more than the current dining room can hold.

There’s been a bit of rearrangement of public rooms. The residents’ lounge has moved next door to the function room and that means that we now have a residents’ bar as well. If the alterations mentioned above happen then the residents’ lounge and the current dining room are likely to swap places. This all depends on our friendly bank manager of course. You’d think that the fact that we own the bank might make this easier but something tells me it won’t.

Star turn

A very happy skater

So, she’s made it! 550 miles and about £1200 raised for help for heroes. After her arrival in Berwick Lorna drove over and brought her back here where she made a new friend…

Laura meets Miss Frances

Meanwhile it’s been rather too busy here for blogging. If you are that way inclined you can follow me on Twitter – mrjcampbell.