The front portico entrance to the Birch Ridge Inn.

The front portico entrance to the Birch Ridge Inn.

It has been a busy spring....

With the summer solstice just behind us, and the long days of summer ahead of us, Mary and I are wrapping up most of the projects we set out to accomplish this spring. Major projects, including repairing siding and painting the exterior of the inn were have been (mostly) completed by trusted contractors. Heating system and plumbing repairs have been started. The last bit of system upgrades are waiting for parts to arrive before installation can be scheduled. Maintenance items like carpet cleaning of public spaces, installing new linoleum on the floor of the kitchen, painting an interior hallway, installing summer air conditioners, etc... have all been completed as planned.

The reality is, however, that most of the items mentioned above are "invisible", as they should be, to guests who visit Birch Ridge. But a couple of big projects that we took on this spring are directly seen by every guest who physically or virtually enters the inn.

Mary, with the help of our Chef Reggie, took on the big job of renewing the front portico of the inn. Reggie had the unenviable job of sanding all of the surfaces of the portico to remove the old weather beaten finish. Mary in the mean time took down the door and proceeded to do the same. (If you happened to be at the inn in May there were periods where the front door of the inn was just a piece of plywood to keep the local bear population coming out of hibernation at bay.) Before applying new finishes, Mary did a lot of research. Based upon the advice of our painting contractor, Mary acquired a collection of marine grade sealers which she used to revitalize and refinish the wood. A new front door lock and a brass kick plate finished the efforts intime to re-open the inn over the Memorial day weekend.

Before and after photos of the Front Portico entrance to the Birch Ridge Inn. Click again to resume rotation.

In the virtual world, we have completely redesigned the entrance to the inn as well.

Over the last couple of months, I did a complete system redesign of our inns website, birchridge.com. Several years ago I had updated our web architecture to support desktop and mobile devices. This is an absolute requirement for any website intended to be accessed by the general public. Whereas the old site architecture detected a users device and steared the user to a device specific web site, the new architecture for birchridge.com is based upon "Responsive Design" techniques. Procedures built into each web page automatically adjust how a page is displayed based upon the users screen. Users who access birchridge.com from thier desktop will see the same information when they switch to their tablet of mobile device. The information will automatically reformat to fit the users device, without the need for separate device specific web sites.


Visit the full Birch Ridge Inn website at birchridge.com.

You can see how responsive design on birchridge.com works from your desktop by changing the size of your web browser window. I have tested the site with every modern browser (IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Andriod) that I could get my hands on. I even borrowed the mobile phones of several guests during my testing to verify operation...although Mobile browsers generally follow industry standards much more closely than desktop browsers with the exception of handling touch inputs. But that is an arcane subject suitable for discussion over a beer in the Great Room of the inn. No need to bore you here.

We still have a few more projects to wrap up as we head into the summer. We are also working with Chef Reggie designing the menu and selecting the wines for our wine dinner at the Killington Wine Festival in July. (It's a tough job but somebody has to do it.)

All this, of course, is a pre-cursor to being able to get out of the inn and chase the little white ball across the golf course. But that is story for another day.

Where ever you may be, keep it in the fairway, and don't forget your sun screen!