We have some exciting news to share with you all! The eagle eyed will have noticed that our holiday cottage, St Milburga Chapel seem to be booked up for the next few weeks! We’ve blocked out the next few weeks while we have some welcome renovation done at our cosy holiday cottage. When we first took over St Milburga Chapel it had been operating as self-catered holiday accommodation for around 20 years. It had been well looked after over that time but the décor was starting to look a little tired, it needed freshening up and areas such as the kitchen and the bathroom were looking a bit dated.
We acquired St Milburga Chapel in May 2022 and planned to spend the next few months renovating as much as we could before re-opening for holiday bookings for the following year. It was a lot of hard work! To save costs, we decided to do as much of the decorating ourselves and spent hours painting and decorating over the Summer 2022. There was a lot of wall to paint, especially with the double height ceiling in the open plan lounge and all the fiddly wooden beams to paint around. The bathroom was very dated with a peach-coloured bathroom suite, sea blue tiles and a lot of pine. We knew that was definitely a room we had to renovate before re-opening so we found a local builder/plumber and set too designing a brand new modern bathroom in keeping with the aesthetic look of a converted chapel. We were very pleased with the results and were especially glad that we opted for underfloor heating to make it super cosy to use on chilly Shropshire mornings.
However, there was one major area of St Milburga Chapel that we didn’t do much too at the time and that was the kitchen! Although, kitchen fashions have moved on over the years, it wasn’t too bad, had fared well given its age and everything in it still worked so we decided to update the door handles and leave it for now. Doing the kitchen renovation would have been a much bigger, costlier job than the bathroom and we also wanted to see how the kitchen functioned before making any major changes – things like how many cupboards were needed, what size dishwasher would be most suitable, what sort of cooker worked best, can you access all areas, is the worktop space enough – questions we would only really know once it was in use and we stayed there ourselves over time.
We have had 2 successful holiday seasons so far with lots of happy guests and great reviews but we knew the time had come to bite the bullet and finally update the kitchen. After all, we want to offer our guests a luxury holiday cottage experience. Opening for the past 2 years showed us that January was definitely our quietest month for bookings (not a surprise) so we have opted to close after the recent Christmas holidays to give us the time needed to complete the project. Having used them previously and found them to be decent quality and cost effective, we opted to choose a kitchen from Howdens. The lovely Hattie, from the local branch of Howdens in Ludlow came out to see us and talk through what we were looking for. She came up with a fantastic design which will hopefully make the kitchen area much brighter and cleaner and better to use. We’ve opted for a full height fridge freezer, induction hob, slimline dishwasher, washing machine/tumble dryer and black handles and taps to carry through the aesthetic from the rest of the chapel. The units are a Shaker style in a soft shade of sage green and we’ve opted for a tough quartz worktop that will hopefully stand the test of time.
Luckily, our wonderful local builder/plumber who did such a good job of the bathroom was available and so a few weekends ago we spent a day emptying the kitchen, packing everything away and dust sheeting everywhere for work to start on the Monday.
We can’t wait to see the finished result and hopefully it will make a stay at St Milburga Chapel and even better experience whether that is for a short weekend break or a longer holiday in Shropshire. We’ll post updates as we go along but as long as no major issues, St Milburga Chapel should be open again as a luxury holiday cottage in a few short weeks.