Friday, December 02, 2011
Carol O’Callaghan says preparing a room for an overnight guest at Christmas need not involve expensive redecoration
IN a moment of seasonal beneficence, did you invite overnight guests for Christmas? So now, on top of an already busy workload of preparations, you have to make time to turn a messy or shabby room into guest accommodation. First of all, stay calm and console yourself with the reminder you don’t need to decorate if there’s no one to take on that particular chore, and doing it yourself fills you with dread. Little B&B-style touches will transform a room in a few hours and you might actually enjoy the process.
Before contemplating what you might need to buy, deal with the very basic practicalities. If space is tight and you can’t empty an entire wardrobe and chest of drawers for your guests, free up a few hangers’ width of space and at least one drawer, and clear the surface of the chest of drawers for their personal effects.
Also, put a chair in the room: you may not think it necessary for a short stay, but some people don’t like sitting on the bed to tie shoelaces, fearing they’ll squash a feathery eiderdown.
A chair is also a handy place to drape clothes they don’t want to put back in the wardrobe, or it can be used to perch a suitcase so guests don’t have to kneel on the floor to unpack. If hanging space is really a problem, try something as simple as a hook on the back of the door to hold a garment bag for easy access to its contents.
A table or night-stand beside the bed is a must, topped with a lamp, as there’s nothing worse than being in a strange room, switching off the main light and then having to feel your way around the walls to find the bed, especially after consuming a thimbleful or two of Christmas cheer. Don’t forget to add a few books and magazines, just in case your guests want a quiet minute alone during the day.
If you’re not in the market for new bed linen, do choose some new towels and fold them neatly, corner to corner, and place on the bed topped with a bar of herb-scented hand-soap and a little box of paper handkerchiefs.
Chances are you won’t be able to allocate a bathroom for the sole use of your guest, so make sure you have a mirror in the bedroom for hair brushing and make-up application.
Be careful, however, not to go over the top: your efforts to attend to all the little details to make your guests feel at home may actually have the opposite effect, so stop short at putting a kettle in the room just in case they think they’re not free to pop into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Instead, set a tray with mini-size snacks and a bottle or two of mineral water, or a water carafe if you have one, and a glass.
Any guests who regularly get an attack of the midnight munchies, or those who might feel a little delicate and wish to counteract the effects of that thimbleful, will appreciate this enormously.
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