“We had a great 2 weeks in Dorset, the weather was great and the area beautiful.”
Sadly I can’t say the same about the cottage/house. This was the worst equipped kitchen of any self catering cottage we have stayed in, ever, there were no oven proof dishes, only one small oven tray. There are items in the kitchen cupboards for baking but no receptacles to cook anything. The stuff in the cupboards is completely disorganised and some very old and worn it’s spread throughout all cupboards, not leaving any space for storing food. I expect to be able to cook decent meals in a SELF CATERING cottage. The bathrooms were clean but the non slip rubber mats are worn and perished. There were not any cleaning fluids in order to keep the toilets clean and hygienic. It would be useful to have a safety handle for climbing in and out of the bath, some one had clearly used the towel rail and it was loose. The sofa in the lounge is not comfortable, it’s like sitting on a cushion on a hard bench. There is a curled up scatter rug in the middle of the lounge carpet, a clear trip hazard. The cottage is advertised as having a washer, this is an item I particularly look for when we are staying more than a week, there isn’t one. The washing facilities are in a communal laundry, it took us a while to find that it is a small room attached to the back of a another cottage, with no signs to tell us where it is. When we eventually found it, the laundry floor was flooded and the washing machines were stood in the water, we mopped the water up before using the washing machines. It would also have been useful to know that £1 coins are required to use the machines. None of this information can be found in the house folders. One thing that was in the folder was instructions on how to turn the outside light on and off with a special switch, sadly the switch has been changed and the outside light is on permanently. Apparently this has been the case for at least the last 3 months, the lady next door asked us to turn it off and showed us the special switch in her house and I explained that this was no longer the case in 44. The property is described as dog friendly but perhaps I should point out that it is not dog safe! The front garden which is very small is enclosed safely but the back garden is not, the fences between the houses are not suitable they are either low or none existent. Our dog could wonder into the next gardens especially when a feral cat came to visit and she ran after it. After having had a dog killed on a road after it escaped from a previous holiday cottage that also was not dog safe as advertised, I found this very worrying. The back garden has 3 flights of uneven stone steps with NO safety handrails, it certainly was unsafe for myself who has several joint replacements to get up and down them. Altogether an unsatisfactory experience.
