Day 84 - When Foxie spent the day in The Barn (or when barriers were removed)

It will come as no shock at all, given the last few days' focus, to hear that the majority of time today for a large group of our volunteers was spent in The Barn. To the general dismay of all involved the day was largely spent scrubbing the floor in the Main Hall to remove the years of paint splatters and dirt caked on there.  Thankfully the edges of the room were worse than the rest (presumably due to their proximity to the walls and therefore the paint) and so as the edges have now been done, we hope that the Main Hall floor is nearly there.  We'll be asking everyone who arrives to the quiz next week to admire how blue and non-paint-y the floor looks....Elsewhere in The Barn, more floors were stripped back with the products provided from Mt. Cleaning, ready to be sealed later in the week, by which time we hope they might have dried - it was taking an age for them to dry this afternoon.  Our curtain installing team were back for another day of getting The Barn dressed and ready for its debut at the weekend.

The wandering barriers around the site were returned to their home in the Coach House Courtyard. The covering over the fencing round the former Swimming Pool was reinstated and some brambles removed and old electric fencing and netting which had become damaged and/or surplus to requirements was removed and rounded up from a number of areas on site and things are looking both safer and tidier as a result - some of the netting had degraded to the point that there was a little trail of green to follow and collect up.

We also spent some time, as we were in that part of the site removing fencing clearing the enormous brambles which had taken over one of the tented village platforms so that this can be assessed for necessary repairs and then cleaned along with the rest of the platforms. There were so many thorns that we thought Foxlease Park may have been graced with its own fairytale and we might find a Sleeping Foxie underneath them all!  We didn't, but we definitely acquired a newfound respect for that fairytale character who hacked their way through the magical thorny forest - we think we might have given up if it was us! But success was achieved and the platform was cleared and the tangled up netting caught in them was removed.  There's more work to do on that area in digging out some of the bramble roots to stop their return but it's a good start in clearing that end of the site to make it useable and much nicer to look at.

We also managed our routine, and very noisy, fire alarm tests across the site.

Work tomorrow depends on the weather but hopefully no monsters to do battle with, Love Foxie x