The Old Lobster House

Aug 11th, 2022

Aug 6th, 2022

May 11th, 2021

Apr 3rd, 2020

I'll give it 3 - Just. 1st impressions? Gorgeous! Then the realities set in. Unique? Only just. There are many gorgeous properties for holiday rental on this stretch of coast. Above and below the England - Scotland border. Struggled getting in. The 2 locks aren't easy. 1 mortice & 1 yale type, both turning 'the wrong way'. Would have been handy to know that in advance. Downstairs: Well equipped & furnished. Home from home with everything you could possibly need. Very comfortable 3-piece suite. Lounge/diner plus kitchen/diner i.e. Dining table and chairs in the lounge plus breakfast or snack table in the kitchen. 2 niggles here, downstairs. 1/ The microwave was situated in the utility room along with a toilet. Not sure that fits with health & hygiene rules, but laws in Scotland are different to those in England. 2/ All the downstairs windows are non-opening! i.e. You can only get fresh air downstairs by opening the front door which opens directly onto the road. Not so very safe if you have pets or a child. The windows are fully salt stained & obscure the view, which you would normally book such a cottage to enjoy. For me, this totally defeated the idea/purpose of choosing this waters edge property. Once you sit down downstairs you can't see diddly squat. Not wanting to be overly critical, simply truthful for the benefit of future holidaymakers. It seemed to us that this would be an unbearable sweat-box in summer if the windows are not released to open. I emphasise: You can't open any of the windows downstairs and you can barely see through them. Upstairs: 2 en-suite bedrooms, which is nice & convenient as well as necessary to negate someone wandering through someone else's bedroom to gain the loo. Nice desk & 'work' area in the small bedroom, along with its single bed. But... bedding very sparse with only one summer weight quilt and 'something else' folded up on the top of it. No extra quilting or blankets anywhere. Again, no sea view from this bedroom due to the position of the desk. Quiet, peaceful, yes. The master bedroom? Now, this was by far the best room in the house with opening sea view windows floor to ceiling. We took to having our coffee breaks here as it was the only room in the house where sea views could be enjoyed. Pity about the paint and plaster pealing off from the inside wall of the window casings, but then, the property doesn't seem to have been decorated since before 2014? I say that because I found while browsing the internet the sale details of this property back in that year (2014). Everything is the same as pictured there. Everything. Same dcor. Same furniture. Everything's the same. Including the same bed with pee stained mattress. The master bathroom also looks fabulous but has its drawbacks. The bath is precipitous + deep = dangerous. You'd need to be young, fit and healthy to 'jump' in & out of there - and then you're gonna hit your head on the gabled ceiling! The ceiling/roof is another problem to bear in mind. Because of the angle, you can't sit up in bed to read nor to enjoy the view. You just can't sit up in bed and you are going to bang your head. Guaranteed. More than once. I actually cut my scalp on one angled sharp edge. Which brings us to the reason we left 2 days early. The beds. My wife just couldn't sleep on the rock hard mattress of the main bedroom. Was/is good quality. If I remember correctly it was a Silent Night Comfort mattress, but a concrete one. Even my 92kgs couldn't move it. It really was rock hard. Now, some people might appreciate that but neither of us could sleep on it, sadly. To make a foam mattress topper available would have solved that problem economically enough. She tried the single bed but that was only fractionally softer. She spent most nights on the settee, which was not good for her at all. We're not young. We are retired. We went here thinking we'd perhaps visit Edinburgh. Definitely visit Bamburgh Castle and Lindisfarne, etc, but we went nowhere. Just too jaded from lack of sleep to do anything, so we came home.
Jan 25th, 2022