Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Four Questions

When we first opened our doors as innkeepers in June of 2000 there were some things we expected, and a lot we didn't. We expected, correctly, that our guests would mostly carry cell phones, so we did not put phones in the rooms. We expected, correctly, that a lot of our guests would come from the New York City area. We did not expect the fact that we named our rooms after neighborhoods in Brooklyn would actually make people decide to book with us. That was a happy surprise. And we did not expect that we would wind up answering the same four questions every single day.

And what are the questions?

1) How old is the house/what year was it built? (Around 135 years/1871.)
2) Was it an inn before you bought it or did you renovate? (Yes*)
3) Has it always been your dream to own a Bed & Breakfast? (No, it was a way to live in a place we love but where the major industry is tourism & hospitality. That is not to say we don't like what we're doing, we just didn't have that romantic dreamy thing going for years and years; we knew it was going to be a lot of hard work.)
4) What are the winters like? (Peaceful.)

There are other questions that come up a lot, but these are the ones nearly every single guest asks us. Not that we mind answering them, we enjoy chatting with our guests, but sometimes it's hard not to smile when these questions do crop up.

* The woman from whom we purchased the house did run what we call a "loose interpretation" of a B&B, which is to say she rented rooms and prepared breakfast for her guests, but all the rooms shared just one bathroom. We did the renovation that gave every room its own bathroom and generally brought the place up to modern standards... and codes.

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