June 30, Decca Cottage - Last day in the Outer Hebrides - About the cottage itself.
Today we leave this place we have fallen in love with. The Outer Hebrides. This
little white cottage with the red door has been a wonderful home for us up at the end of the world. I have to say that there isn't anything here that hasn't completely charmed me. There's the knucklehead sheep in the back garden, the chickens who run full speed for the side of the house every time you open the kitchen window and who will eat bananas (who knew? I still find that funny), the big marmalade tiger cat who tries to get into our side of the cottage every chance he gets.
Since we haven't blogged about the cottage I'll give you some details. The cottage sits next door to the Ness FC and Social Club (FC is football club we're pretty sure). It is a three unit building with a high white wall around each unit so that each has a "private" garden. The front wall of the garden stands about 3/4 car width from the road so when we park the car out front it sits on the road a bit. The roads are so narrow here that it's normal for the cars to take part of the road out of comission when parked.
The cottage we stayed in (finais) is on the north end of the building with another presumably similar unit on the south end. The center portion is where our landlady Elspeth lives. The main part of the house has a large hall off the kitchen which is the center of activity in the house. It is much larger maybe three times as wide as the remainder of the house and abuts what I suspect is the original structure.
Finais has three bedrooms, two up and one down. the bedrooms are carpeted but the rest of the house is linoleum or some variant. The
living room may be wood but I doubt it. There is a fire door at the end of the lower level hall that connects the rental unit to the main house. The kitchen has a small fridge that would fit in my camper I think, a freezer the same size. Both fit under the kitchen counters. There is a single pan sink and a "cooker"
(stove) that is electric. The house is heated with radiators which is convenient for drying your socks. There is a kitchen table and four chairs and sufficient other household stuff for day to day life.
The living room is small and cozy. A peat burning fireplace lies along one wall bordered by bookshelves. A small tv with the requisite five channels (courtesy of the bbc) and a tiny stream of wifi that manages to make it through the foot thick walls between the Finais and the main house. Apparently it is tuned to teenagers because only Hannah's PC can pick it up. Yes, my magical tiny laptop finally found something it couldn't do.
The two upstairs bedrooms butt up against the roof and reflect it in the ceiling. There is a window in each room that is positioned in the roof itself. They have amazing blackout shades that you can draw down and that block out the light almost completely. This is a good thing since the sun doesn't set until after 10pm and comes up around 4am. There is a twin and a double in one bedroom and two twins in the other. A freestanding wardrobe with a muslin cover stands by the door in my room and against the central wall opposite the door in Hannah's. Honestly, I haven't even poked my head in Meg and Terry's bedroom on the ground floor so we'll just have to assume it's similar.
They forego top sheets here in favor of a cotton duvet cover on the comforter. It works fine and reduces the amount of laundry Elspeth has to do so it's just dandy.
All the walls are papered. In many cases it's just to cover up what are lumpy bumpy and cracked plaster walls. Most of the houses here are of cinderblock construction with either a veneer of pebbles or whitewash over concrete applied to the surface. This house has the latter.
A few things that are noticibly different than in the states:
Each electrical outlet (and this is universal across Britain) has an on off switch. Even the ones that run the refrigerator. Found that out a day after we had loaded it up and the fridge was still only cool.
The sinks all seem to have two faucets, hot and cold. There are no mixing faucets except for the shower heads of course. Often times the hot and cold are not marked or are marked obscurely.
The automatic hand dryers that are found in public facilities do not respond to American tourists apparently. Every one that Hannah has tried to use ignored her.
Apparently there is only one brand of dish soap up here. It is called Fairy Liquid and is as
ubiquitous a brand name as Kleenex is in the US for tissue. We're still trying to figure out how they get the liquid out of the fairies. When we purchased the wool sweaters and hats from the guy at the Lewis Loom Center he recommended we wash them in fairy liquid. Don't use the washing machine (except to extract) the "cycles are a bluidy disaster".
A holiday at Decca Cottage never lasts long enough.
Oh, and that whole driving on that SIDEWALK SIDEWALK CURB! side of the road.
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