Excerpts from an article by Rob Johnson
for the Wall Street Journal
PART II - The Reality
A Rude Wake-Up Call
A B&B in a remote location seemed to be the perfect ticket out of the city. She started hunting for spots in travel magazines, and in the summer of 2004, she and her husband, Olivier, fell in love with a 100-year-old four-bedroom, four-bath house near Clearwater, Fla., that had once been a bed-and-breakfast.
The place and the plan seemed beyond perfect, says the 52-year-old Shelley-Grielen. "When I saw the golden sunsets, the pelicans and herons, the century-old oaks dripping Spanish moss and all kinds of palms, I thought, 'I have to live there. I can run this wonderful property. I can make it work.' "
She envisioned weary travelers trekking to the bucolic location at the edge of an estuary and marveling at the inn, which the couple named Green Gables. Ms. Shelley-Grielen calls it "sort of a Norman Rockwell and Maxwell House coffee on Sunday morning model," with her playing a worldly wise Martha Stewart role as the ultimate hostess.
The couple sold their $418,000 house in West New York, N.J., and bought Green Gables, which came with a rental cottage next door, for $575,000. But the inn quickly became an ordeal for Ms. Shelley-Grielen. For starters, she found that the guests invaded her privacy.
When one family rented all three guest bedrooms, Ms. Shelley-Grielen and her husband decided to celebrate by going out to dinner. Before leaving, she took the lodgers on a tour of the house and showed them the off-limits area where she and her husband slept and watched television. But when the couple returned that night, one of the guests was "sitting there in our room, watching one of my husband's DVDs," says Ms. Shelley-Grielen. She politely explained the living arrangements again, and the embarrassed vacationer left. But when the family checked out, one member left a sarcastic message in the guest book: "Don't watch the DVDs."
Unlike Mr. Werner at his Scarborough Fair B&B in Baltimore, Ms. Shelley-Grielen thought that many of her guests were oversharing their lives. She began to see their innocent travel questions as tedious inquisitions, she says. And hated the fake intimacy and feeling like a maid. She realized that B&B management often required her to be more friendly than she felt: "There was an artificial instant intimacy to be affected when my paying guests arrived."
Burned out by what she saw as guests' demands for her company, Ms. Shelley-Grielen began to avoid them when possible. "I would retreat to the kitchen and close the door, with its sign that spelled out, 'Private.' "
But some guests just wouldn't leave her alone, Ms. Shelley-Grielen says. Too often, she heard the invitation: "I hope you'll be joining us." She came to view such offers as "command performances" from which "I didn't have the option to bow out."
Beyond that, chores that she envisioned as routine proved more daunting. For instance, when laundering sheets and towels, she donned disposable gloves. "This is the part of the business I hated most," she says. "I tried not to think about who had sex and who didn't."
Just as she saw the guests intruding on her privacy, she felt she was encroaching to clean bedrooms and baths. Worse, she felt demeaned. "No matter how many times I reminded myself that I owned the place, I still felt like a maid," she says.
Even her aspirations to culinary creativity turned sour. She was disappointed when a guest mistook her homemade Frittata for a Quiche. Her dismay turned to antagonism when some of her favorite dishes weren't welcomed by a vacationing woman who didn't eat eggs. "I felt almost personally offended and would insist on putting an unwanted 'eggy' concoction in front of her every morning," Ms. Shelley-Grielen says.
Not only was the guest annoyed, but so was her husband, who, in a show of solidarity, informed Ms. Shelley-Grielen that he didn't like eggs either. Nor did he want the suggested alternative: grits.
The inn failed to show an operating profit in the three years before the couple sold it in 2007. The house is now a private home. Ms. Shelley-Grielen says, "We did everything we could to stay afloat: drained our savings, plundered IRAs and borrowed." Mr. Grielen, now 55, kept working as a physical therapist in Florida to help make ends meet.
Would the B&B have thrived if Ms. Shelley-Grielen's temperament had been more in tune with running the place? No, she says. "I gave it my professional best," and the guest book had numerous visitors' testaments to their satisfaction.
The couple are now in a Manhattan apartment. Mr. Grielen is still a therapist, while Ms. Shelley-Grielen trained for and started a business as an animal behaviorist. It's not exactly a dream field for her, but she's no longer holding career expectations to the high standard she sought at Green Gables. "Falling in love with the idea of what owning a B&B will be like is like getting a crush on a picture of someone you've never met," she says. "You're just projecting."
Mr. Johnson is a writer in Roanoke County, Va. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com
Read Part I : A Dream Come True
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