I have a serious pet peeve about staying in someone’s house and being less comfortable there than I would be in a seedy motel right off the main highway in a questionable area of a town that has only one grocery store and one drug store and they both close at 6 PM and the nearest hospital is 30 miles away. Get my point? I do not like being uncomfortable anywhere, much less in someone else’s home where you really can’t express how uncomfortable you are because you don’t want to offend them or get kicked out on your butt in the cold before getting a turkey leg at Thanksgiving dinner.
So with the holidays coming up and the impending visits from family and friends, I thought I would share a few tips on how to make sure your house guests are comfortable.
- Do not put your guests in a room that is so crowded with your own furniture, clothes, trinkets, etc. that they have no place to put their things. The room doesn’t even have to be large, just empty of everything but a bed, a dresser and a nightstand. Oh, and a TV would be nice.
- Please, by all means, leave some clean sheets and towels out in plain sight so we don’t have to go digging through your overstuffed linen closet (I’ll admit I have one of those) to find them. And while you’re at it, pick up some matching sets. Some of us are anal about these things.
- It would be great if you could leave some comfortable, at least halfway firm, pillows on the bed. Nothing worse than lying on a flat pillow all night and waking up with outlines of mattress springs on your head.
- If you have kids, it might be a good idea to have a talk with them before your guest arrives and firmly stress that they are not by any means to go into said guest’s room and wake them up. Just because your kids get up at the crack of dawn doesn’t mean your guest wants to. This tip is especially important for those guests who do not have young kids.
- If you intend to cook breakfast, check with your guests the night before and ask them for suggestions or what they would like to eat. What’s worse than waking up to the smell of bacon grease when you don’t even eat pork? Well, OK, I eat it but hubby doesn’t. I can see him gag in his mouth a little every time he smells bacon grease. It’s quite funny, actually.
- Lastly, and this is the most important tip of all, clean up before your guests arrive! We really don’t need to see moldy cheese in the fridge, rings in the toilet boil, crumbs on the breakfast table, dust on the coffee table and hair on the bar of soap in the bathroom. I shudder just thinking about that last one.
So if you’ve been wondering why your guests never come back for another sleepover, you now know why. Consider this my public service announcement for the year.
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