Someone texts that they are coming for Thanksgiving, and staying a few nights. You are glad. Then, somewhere between the turkey and the pie, a quieter question shows up: where is everyone going to sleep?
Here is how we work it out, in the order we do it. It takes one sitting at the kitchen table and saves a lot of shuffling later.
If the weeks before the holidays always feel crowded, our free guide The 5 Things Secretly Stealing Your Time is a short, calm place to start.
Start with the list, not the rooms
Before you look at a single bed, write down who is coming. Arrival day and time, departure day and time, how many nights, adults and children. Then add the small things that change where someone should sleep: an early riser, a late sleeper, someone working while they are here, someone for whom stairs are a problem, a baby, a dog.
It sounds like extra work. It is the opposite. Once the list is in front of you, most of the sleeping decisions make themselves. The person who is up at five does not go on the living room couch. The guest with bad knees does not get the upstairs room.
Match each person to a spot
Now make three short columns: who, where they are sleeping, and what bedding that spot needs. Fill it in one line at a time. When a line will not work, you find out tonight, not at ten o’clock on the night they arrive.
Most houses end up using some mix of three kinds of space, and each one has its own small catch.
A real guest room. The easy one. Clean sheets, a lamp that works, a place to charge a phone from the bed, one empty surface for their things and a glass of water on the nightstand. Guests notice all of it and will ask for none of it.
A room that has another job. The office, the craft room, the room where the boxes live. A room can be borrowed, but it needs somewhere to sleep, somewhere to put things and a door that closes. Turn the screens off, put the papers and mail out of sight, and clear one surface completely. If the bed is an air mattress, inflate it the night before. They lose air, and you want to know now, not at eleven at night. Air mattresses sleep cold, so put out one more blanket than you think.
The living room. The bed is rarely the hard part here. The hard part is that their bedroom is also everyone’s hallway. Pull the sofa bed out and test it before they come, and lay a folded quilt over the bar you can feel through the mattress. Then decide where their suitcase lives during the day, out of the walking path, and where the bedding goes each morning.
Have the timing talk on day one
Whoever sleeps in a shared space needs to know two things: when the room clears at night, and roughly when the house wakes up. Nobody wants to be the person who kept everyone up, or the person sitting on the edge of the couch waiting to go to bed.
Say it once, out loud, on the first evening. While you are at it, cover the Wi-Fi, which bathroom is theirs and who showers when. Four plain sentences on day one save a week of polite guessing.
Think about the dark
Walk from each sleeping spot to the bathroom with the lights off. Is the path clear? Is there a nightlight? Does the porch or hall light shine straight into the room? This is the part that is easy to skip, and it is the part guests remember, because it is the part they had to work out alone at two in the morning.
Decide what you are not doing
Your house does not need to become a hotel. Pick one or two things you are letting go of for this visit, write them down, and stop deciding them again every morning. Maybe it is the new towels you were going to buy. Maybe it is a full clean of rooms nobody will enter.
If guests are coming for Thanksgiving dinner too, Hosting Thanksgiving Without Doing It All covers the food side the same way: plan it once, then hand out the jobs.
The night before
Keep the last evening short. Sheets on every bed, wherever it is. Towels out. Lamps and the porch light on. Coffee set up for the morning. Then go to bed. Whatever is not done by then is not going to be noticed.
If you would rather fill in pages than make your own lists, the Overnight Guest Checklist has the guest snapshot, a page for each kind of sleeping space and a house card to leave in their room.
And if you want a little more room in the weeks ahead, the free guide The 5 Things Secretly Stealing Your Time is here whenever you are ready.
♡
Life Systems Co