I believe we were the first guests to stay in the new guest room at Susan’s place. This room is probably ok if you’re staying for just the one night and only have a weekend bag. Anything more than that and it isn’t really fit for purpose sadly. The bed takes up 90% of the floor space so there’s nowhere to put a suitcase let alone try to open it and unpack a few things. There aren’t any hooks, shelves or racks to hang anything up or any storage at all.
The heating was always on full and all of the windows are painted shut which made for uncomfortable sleep. It was a chore to even open curtains as everything is covered in a layer of chintz and decoration. Twice, a curtain pole fell down, and we had to untie some glittery bunting which had been tied to either end of another pole preventing us from opening the curtains/windows.
The only place to get drinking water was from the bathroom tap. There was a coffee machine but we didn’t get any more pods after the first day and we weren’t allowed access to most of the rest of the property.
We immediately felt like we needed to creep around because of how many times it said to be quiet in the check in instructions, and how often it was reiterated that we must remove our shoes before entering the building. We barely spent any time at the place and only came back to sleep, and we always whispered. Despite this we still got a message at 10am one morning telling us we needed to close the bedroom door - which had a sticky handle - more quietly.
We were allowed to go in the kitchen after I asked if we could. To access this we weren’t allowed to go through the house and instead we’re told to leave the building from the side door of the house, and go around the back through garden. There were 2 rainstorms whilst we were there so this wasn’t fun, and it was clear she hadn’t really set up to have guests in there so we felt really intrusive and uncomfortable. We never actually went back in to retrieve the food we’d bought on the first day and left in there.
This was not a comfortable stay in any sense. We didn’t see Susan our entire stay despite hearing her several times, until we were leaving with our suitcases and she came out to say hi and told us about how doing Airbnb is her livelihood and how important and great it was that we stayed. It felt very much as though we were being pressured to leave a good review which I did not appreciate at all after the only comms from her in 4 days was to tell us to be quiet. She also requested an additional £15 after we’d checked out because we’d untied the end of the string bunting on the curtain and apparently this meant it was broken and she couldn’t get a replacement.
Gets 2 stars because it was at least clean and the bed was quite comfortable. Avoid.