Artwork in Guestbook

Over the winter holidays, one of our guests drew a really nice picture in our guestbook:

Here is what they said:

Brian and family,

Our family loved the Duck House. We gathered here for Xmas with our Seattle Family and friends from Phoenix, Cleveland and California.

It was so comfortable and cozy. Thank you for all of the little details that made being away from home so easy. The kitchen is set up great and so is the rest of the house.

We were thrilled to have snow on Xmas day. It was beautiful watching here on the lake. We loved walking here in the area. Our 2 grandsons (6 months and 4 months) had a great time. Our youngest daughter even got engaged at the Space Needle while we were here! Many things to celebrate!
We will recommend your place to many and hope to be back someday.

Thanks again.

And here is what one of the kids wrote:

Brian-

Thank you so much. We had a great stay at the Duck House. It was a great place to stay with our family. It was well equipped, and the view was very enjoyable.

The directions and places to visit were very helpful.

Thanks again!

That is very rewarding that we have made a home where people can meet and really have a great time! You can read more comments in the full guestbook.

Guestbook entries

We have a physical guestbook located in the house, and I have finally typed in all of our guests’ comments. I have posted them as a page in this blog, and also using the VRBO associated guestbook (which is not very pretty, but people use it a lot when browsing via VRBO). I’m honored by the comments, and I’m glad that everybody is enjoying the place!

Many happy guests

So, its been 6 weeks and we’ve had about 6 different groups of people come through the house.  Thankfully, everybody seems to really like the house, the lake and the location (so close to Seattle).  Its nice to see that all our effort in getting this place up and running is resulting in happy people.  I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to all the new people and hearing the stories for why they are visiting Seattle.  Weddings, births, visiting family, last-minute trips to escape the heat… people generally seem to travel for happy reasons.  (Well, I suppose a lot of travel is for business, but I haven’t broken into that market yet).  Anyway, its fun to help people have a good time and feel comfortable and at home while they travel.

First house call: broken WiFi

Three sets of guests have come and gone at the Duck House. There has been plenty of glowing praise for the house and the peaceful and beautiful location. But, I usually try hard to get some suggestions after their stay so that I can make it better for the next guests. So far, I have forgotten a few things: no foil, no veggie peeler, ran out of TP (woops), confusion about how to check-out, missing trash can outside. These seem like relatively minor things that I can take note of and fix after they leave.

Today was the first urgent problem: the WiFi was broken. This was after their second night, and I got an email asking about extending the stay and noting the WiFi problem. I called her back quickly and rushed to the house with my laptop and a spare router. The router at the house was a really fancy Actiontec DSL modem and wireless router combo unit that I bought at a local garage sale a few weeks ago for $10. I showed up and none of the correct lights were on, so I rebooted it and it seemed to connect to the internet, but the “wireless” light was still off. So, I had to go into the configuration and turn it on and rename the network from the default. This was puzzling, since I had already set up the wireless and the previous guest used it extensively. I’m not sure why it was off, but hopefully that won’t happen again.

Very exciting post, for sure. It just seems important to note the first house call.

Almost ready for guests!

The duck house is almost ready for guests! We’ve been working hard on furnishing, decorating and finishing up the last of the interior repairs. This past weekend, I installed a handrail to the basement (much safer now), put all the knobs in the upstairs bathroom, fastened the shower curtain rod to the wall so it won’t come down any more, installed a lock on the crawl space so our guests don’t accidentally end up in the not-so-pleasant crawl space, removed the 6 inches of dirt from the steps on the side of the house, and various other improvements.

I also had the pleasure of meeting one of our reserved guests who is in town for a quick visit, but will be coming for about a week in June to watch her daughter graduate from UW. She had many good things to say about the house and I think she’s very much looking forward to her visit. This should be a fun place for her family, since everybody can come and go as they please, and it will feel very comfortable.

Only 3 weeks until our first guests!