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Imagine the cottage from The Holiday, and then hype it up more.  And add some more!  Add in dishes for tea for 24 of your closest friends, and maybe then you are in the right neighbourhood!  It has low ceilings with dark beams that I can rach up and touch easily.  Yet it has a modern double oven and electric stovetop (which they call a Hob).   I think I could likely throw a tea party here at the cottage in summer for 50 friends without having to rent any dishes!  Our pet parent loves dishes (crockery?) by Emma Bridgewater, made locally in the UK, and she gave us a gift of our own Emma Bridgewater mug so we will remember this sit always!

(The coolest potato masher)

The décor at our cottage in Surrey was out of this world!  Our pet parent is a serious lover of all things antique, and has filled all the nooks and crannies in every room with her collectables.  There are so very many collectables!  She enjoys displaying taxidermy (animals which have been purchased in the thrift or antique shops, not animals she found wandering in the garden) and as I write this in the living room I can see a hare, baby goat, lamb, 3 birds, another 2 bunches of bunnies (6 together in that grouping) and a deer head with small antlers wearing a pearl headdress and sleigh bells, and a squirrel, then on the other side of the room there is another group of two large hares, some kind of otter I think, a little something that looks like a baby ferret, 2 small baby goats, another mystery small mammal, and at least 5 baby chicks, and a sea bird in flight.  Oh, and there is a fawn curled up on one of the chairs.  I may have missed some.  Now… imagine many of them wearing crowns!

I will post videos and more photos on facebook and instagram - follow me there!

There are also things like REAL sheepskin throws or rugs (which the kitties absolutely love!), many many throw pillows, statuary (the 5 foot angel recovered form a church, busts and heads and figurines and miniatures), and a large collection of china dolls, copper pots, lots of artificial flowers in big porcelain decorative watering jugs.  (editor’s note – the pot of fake daffodils was actually real!  I didn’t notice until they started to fade.  My bad...)  

Throw in some framed pictures and photographs and mirrors, of course, some lace table toppers, and maybe you get the gist.   It takes a long time just to see everything that is in a single room, including where one of the kitties is napping, hahaha! Thankfully the kitties like to follow people around, and we were shown many of the places they like to curl up for a nap, so we aren’t just playing hide and seek all the time!  They also come when you call them, which is a nice treat.  And sometimes necessary, especially at bed time!  Willow will 110% steal your seat in the living room.

This was my working space in the living room for my blog: 

Our bedroom had many many pillows, crisp cotton linens, several quilts in case we needed them, and the sheepskin throw across the foot that has featured in so very many of our photos of the kitties.  But it also had a LOT of decor, including quite a few antique mirrors, crucifixes with Jesus hanging on them, at least one nun figurine, I thing some saints, mannequins with ballet costumes, a top hat, black tie and scarf, a number of hats, several taxidermy birds and half of a hare, quite a lot of doll heads for displaying things, and then some.  And a painted wrought iron bed.  Did all of that bother me?  Nope, not at all!  Although I did misplace Willow a few times when she climbed up to look out the window!  (very much a Where's Waldo game!)

The main bathroom has a bidet!  Pretty cool...  until you find out that Alfie believes it is his own private watering dish.  So, not so useful as an actual bidet.  It also sports a lot of seaside decor.  :)

 

Here we have the dining room...

   

And the stairs (looking up, then a shot from the top looking down):  

 

The house has a bright conservatory on the back of the living room, which adds a big dining area for 8 or 10 people.  If it’s a bit chilly, there is a space heater to warm it up.  It has a centrepiece of a large crystal chandelier, which the homeowner bought at an antique sale, and it had to be all taken apart and rewired and reassembled, which took a long time.  All around there are chandeliers and lights with crystals on them and fairy lights.  So pretty with everything sparkling!  My favourite space - the Conservatory!    

 

 

One of the things we realized was going to be different was from reading the list of amenities the cottage had.  There was a washing mashine, but no dryer!  We had to hang up our clothes in the conservatory, or over the radiators throughout the house to get them dry.  So we had to allow about 3 days to get all our clothes dry enough to fold them and put them away!  We had to calculate carefully when we were going to run out of clean knickers! And since we were having our friends over, we also had to work around that schedule - as we didn't want to be eating our brunch in the conservatory with all of our clothes hanging in everyone's faces.

 

Something we didn’t count on was the mystery of finding all the light switches after the homeowner had departed, even though she gave us a detailed rundown on everything.  I’m definitely going to blame that on the jet lag, combined with taking the red-eye!  In the kitchen there were switches beside the door going into the utility room, and there were switches beside the door going into the dining room, but there were more lights than that which weren’t coming on!  They were hidden everywhere, and the power bars also have an on-off switch for many of the individual plugs.  And a lot of the wall outlets, at least in the kitchen, also have a pair of switches to toggle the power off and on for that particular plug!  I haven’t seen anything like that before!  She showed us a bunch of the items plugged in had red dots on them, meaning don’t unplug them.  But yet apparently that also means don’t press the little switch beside the outlet or it is going to cut the power off!  Oops.  So that was a bit of a fail for us, lol. And eventually we did find all the switches for the lights we were looking for in the kitchen, with the last bank of switches finally located behind the stack of serving trays propped at the end of the built in china cabinet!  (Yes, this was infinitely more difficult than the house sit we did in Buffalo.) 

 

Oh, and the light switch in the powder room was actually a long pull chain just inside the door!  I shouldn’t call it a powder room though;  here it is just the toilet (with the tiniest sink I’ve seen in a long time). Apparently that isn’t unusual here, as our friends nearby also have that kind of light control in their bathroom in their 1920’s house.  The chain is attached to some sort of little ceiling control box, and the light fixture itself is over in the middle of the room, so there is no resemblance to the cheap pull-string light fixtures we had in our basement when we bought our newly built house in the 90’s in Canada.

The door knobs here aren’t door knobs;  they are latches, and are at about shoulder height (Maybe so small children had no choice but to stay in their room?)

 

At our friends' house they also have the door latches on the doors at shoulder height.

 

Hmmm.  How many times did I automatically reach down for a door knob at night?  Many times!

Our friends asked us if we had to pay the utilities while we stayed at the cottage.  No, thankfully we didn't have to.  They were very relieved, just saying utilities were very expensive in the UK.  How expensive?  These were some of the rates we saw - the RED rate was from breakfast time until around 2 or 3pm, at 2.45 pounds per kw hour;  orange was from maybe 3pm to 6pm, at 1.02 pounds, and evenings were .12 per kw hour.  The exchange rate was about 1.85, meaning it was about $4.41/hour, $1.83/hour, and .22/hour Canadian.  What do we pay?  Our peak rates at home in Canada were charged at 15.8 cents per kw hour, mid-peak was 12.2 cents, and off-peak was 7.6 cents.  Of course we also have all those other charges (delivery, regulatory charges, and HST) meaning our "real" rates are triple that - but really, so it would be 45 cents per hour, 37 cents, and 22 cents per hour.  Hmmm... So maybe we shouldn't complain quite so much about our costs...  Also the oil man came by and filled the oil tank for the boiler, with 1200 litres of heating oil, at 63.9 pence per litre.  So the cost of that fill up would have been about 767 pounds ($1379 Canadian!)  Hopefully that amount of oil will last a long time!  Yes, I am very thankful that we don't have utilities prices quite so high in Canada.

 

ps we were very lucky to have been given a brand new hybrid car as our rental!  So, driving around for 18 days of house sitting cost us all of 83 pounds in petrol ($149 Canadian), at a rate of 1.39 pounds per litre of petrol (translation $2.50/L Canadian!!!)

The key for the door is a lovely old fashioned one!  The little metal disc spins out of the way, but in the meantime it would keep drafts and moisture out of the locking mechanism.  And maybe spiders. Did I see a bug?  No, not a single one!  No flies, no spiders, no crawly things anywhere inside or outside.  But - February isn't exactly prime season for insects!