30/03/2026
🎉 It's our Birthday! 🎉
Did you know that I've been running Church Farm Barns for 10 years this March?
Ten whole years!
And what a ten years it's been.
My husband and I were offered the opportunity to move to Norfolk and take over the barns from March 2016.
We packed up our lives and, as young 20 something year olds, moved across the country to start our new life managing these beautiful holiday cottages.
We still both worked from home in other jobs, so we fitted our new work load around this.
Oh the things we learnt in that first year!
We did everything from the cleaning, the laundry, advertising, taking bookings, dealing with the guests issues during their stay, to name a few of our new jobs!
I learnt about a hundred new DIY skills including how to bleed a boiler, rod the drains, unblock the septic tank (don't ask 🤢).
How to make 13 beds, clean 3 kitchens and 7 bathrooms all to a 5 star standard and within a 5 hour time frame (who needs the gym!?).
We also carried out maintenance and gardening on the outside of the properties.
We learnt that guests can be peculiar creatures, who complain about the most bizarre things (I feel that this is a whole other post for another day, but some of my favourites are "the roads are too narrow" "the (standard electric) oven is dangerous as a child might get inside it" and let's not forget "the birds chirruping is rather loud").
I have so many stories from the last decade in this job that I keep getting told I should write a book!
My husband began to focus more on his 'proper' job and I worked on increasing our booking numbers and revenue (running holiday cottages is expensive 😬).
Norfolk is where we welcomed both of our amazing children into our family. And in doing so we realised that I couldn't keep doing it all alone, so we added some fantastic cleaners to our team. Norfolk is where we learnt we could still successfully run the barns whether we lived on site, in the next village, or back "closer to home" in the Midlands.
Norfolk is where I honed my skills in the holiday rental market, and gained the knowledge and confidence to set up my own business managing other holiday accommodation in the local area (* cough * Norfolk Nights ).
Over the last 10 years we've welcomed so many lovely guests (and their dogs) to stay. Guests have celebrated too many birthdays, anniversaries and hen parties to count.
As a thank you to all of our guests for all of your support, we are offering 10% off of our remaining dates in April and May.
Thank you for being part of our story at Church Farm Barns 😊
Louise x
www.churchfarmbarnsnorfolk.co.uk
