Firstly, Porthia is a well laid out, roomy property in a lovely location for exploring St Ives and the surrounding areas. The fact that it has a second parking space is also a huge bonus given the lack of parking spaces in Saltings Reach. On entering the property, our first impression was how dirty it was - the mirror to the left of the front door was so smeared that it was difficult to see anything in it, and the light flooding through the kitchen window only served to make the dust that covered the hallway floor more visible. Things were just as bad in the living and dining rooms, with what appeared to be baked bean juice on the dining table covering (the tablecloth was so dirty that when my wife wiped it with a clean cloth and some soapy water, she had to then throw the cloth away) and really bad stains on the living room settees (it looked as if a number of the previous occupiers had spilled food and drink on them). We also wondered why some of the cushions had been put back on the settees backwards, but when we turned them around we could see that it was because they were so heavily stained. There were marks on the walls and on the carpets, but I’m guessing that this is unavoidable at this time of the season; albeit that no attempt appears to have been made to remove them. When we checked upstairs we could see that none of the used bar soap from the previous occupiers had been removed from the soap dishes. In fact, very little attempt appeared to have been made to clean the bathrooms. The tiling in the shower areas was covered in mould, so the first thing we did was to buy some cleaning products and scrub this off the en-suite. The shower seals were so dirty that they’d turned orange, but we didn’t clean these for fear of damaging them. Also, the wc in the en-suite had what appeared to be a contact lens from a previous occupier stuck to the side of the pan. The whole property looked dreary - I know it’s a matter of the owner’s personal taste, but I would suggest that the property could be improved significantly if some of the soft furnishings and prints were thrown out and replaced with something a bit brighter - prints from places like Whistlefish aren’t expensive, but would make the property look much less gloomy.
