Our guest room basically holds one and the few times we have guests its often more than one; in which case we make the living-room and dining-room into a sort of guest room/apartment. Mostly the guest room is a computer and putter room which makes clutter an issue.
My old house, sold in 2004 after I got married, was a 3 bedroom, 1.5 story. The upstairs was my bedroom. The back bedroom on the ground floor was my library. The front bedroom was my guest room.
Then I started using the basement room as my study and after a while, I had to intentionally walk in the two ground level bedrooms every couple of months because I never used them or went in them anymore.
My uncle wanted to stay with me one time, bringing his girlfriend. My parents told him that he couldn’t bring his gf into my house and sleep in the same room with her. I only found that out after he got a hotel room. I was not happy about it. :mad:
My “guest room” is in reality my totally unused bedroom. And I live in a one bedroom house. It’s a big room and I long ago got tired of keeping it clean. So I moved my bed into a closet and sleep there.
The bedroom is guest ready but I make it a point not to advertise it to relatives, nor to many other people. So I have in fact never had an uninvited guest.
While I try diligently to keep the room in a parallel universe I somehow still have the ability to move things into it. It’s not a problem, but I occasionally have to travel through the portal to get rid of stuff. (I still don’t have to actually clean it though.)
P.S. In case it’s not clear, housekeeping is not one of my strong suits.
I get more wanted guests!
A lot of my friends are touring musicians, so they will come stay while in London. Or my friends who want to come to London to see musicians. Or a couple of my friends that I run a charity with will stay - one lives across town, one lives alone, we have wine and giggle and then they end up staying over.
My overseas mates come visit, too. It’s really great, we love it.
My guest room is occupied (by a guest, not a cat) on average once a week or so, unless overseas guests then it can be occupied for two weeks or more. I have guest keys, so I just give them a set of keys and the run of the house. If I trust you to stay in my home I trust you to let yourself in and out.
It is how I’ve always wanted it so I was lucky when we moved here this year it started happening.
We have two extra bedrooms that are ready for use at a moments notice. We rarely have overnight guests, they’re usually unplanned party goers who cannot drive (or walk) when 3 am chimes.
My son and daughter did a longer visit, but in most cases our guests stumble out and are on their way the next day. We would never consider having strangers stay.
Missing option; “I have no spare room”
Someone needs to sleep over, they get the couch.
José Antonio Samaranch and his wife kept separate bedrooms. I once read an interview where she was asked for pointers on things that had helped their marriage and she promptly jumped with that one. The reporter was surprised, and her response was “he’s like a squirrel! He’ll jump out of bed at any hour and start working! Me, I need my eight hours, and the house is not so big that we’ll get lost on the way to each other’s bed.”
We have two unused bedrooms. One was my husband’s office until he moved to the study downstairs which is three times as large. The other was our ex housemates’ bedroom.
My husband’s old office has become a catch-all for all his office/computer paraphernalia. It’s a mess in there. I was thinking of making it my office after we cleaned it out but the internet connection up there is wonky. It’s a very small, very cramped room. You could maybe fit a full bed in there but that would be it.
Our ex housemates took their bed with them when they moved out, so the other bedroom’s bureaus/closet now house our out of season clothing. I’ve thought about turning it into my office, but the thought of “what happens if somebody wants to visit?” pops into my mind. Not that anybody does, LOL, but it’d be a more hospitable stay for them rather than sleeping on the couch. Plus they’d have the sole use of the bathroom at the end of the hall.
I voted that I get more wanted guests, but only because if I didn’t have a guest room they would stay with someone else or go to a motel.
Like many people, in addition to the guest room we have a study/library and it contains a sleeper sofa that so far has been used only by my SO’s nephews while brother and sister-in-law use the guest room.
We are lucky enough to have more closet and storage space than we need, so there’s no clutter in the guest room.
We actively eliminated our spare bedrooms. One’s an office, the other’s a study. Any guests can either go to a hotel or sleep on the floor.
Your poll is incomplete.
For us it’s where the cats go to have a quiet sleep (in bed!), away from us humans, as well as gaze out the bedroom window in a cat tower.
Nothing like have a queen bed all to yourself where you only take up as much room as a sweatshirt crumpled into a tight ball.
I want to be a cat now.
I’ve watched way too many of my family and friends end up with long term residents after allowing guests in the door (the kind that need a place while they “get back on their feet”).
Within extended families and co-workers, I can name 3 cases of kindness resulting in freeloaders for over a decade. Two of these are still going on, the third only ended when the guest died (natural causes). I’ve made the mistake of sympathy for a sob story and got myself 2 years of an extra person inhabiting my house, tagging along to every restaurant, every meal, every outing. And I finally learned compassion is for suckers.
To the OP: Due to hobbies and our empty nest we somehow ended up with a surfeit of rack space (3 unused bedrooms in our house, space for 4 in our cruiser, and 4 in the RV). We could take in half the family, and the Eye of Sauron is noticing and turning to the West. So we’re refusing any “visits” from the shiftless, and repurposing the bedrooms for office, workout, art, etc. Swords are drawn, and the cry has gone up: “Repel All Boarders!”
They said I needed a hobby in retirement…
I went with the last one, but, in actuality, it really is just a storage room with a bed that someone may possibly use if they happen to come over. It’s not really made for them, just we happen to have a bed in it.
We have plenty of extra space but only infrequent overnight guests. I sort of like hosting, despite its stresses, but all of my friends live an ocean away. I’ve considered being a couchsurfing host, but our HOA specifically disallows it. Spoilsports.
Our second bedroom is actually my wife’s office. We have a sleeper sofa in the basement that we use as a guest bedroom. It’s good for the guests because they have their own full bath and can kind of stay in their own apartment until they’re ready to come hang out.
I said it doesn’t attract unwanted guests, but that’s not entirely accurate. My brother and his wife have taken to using it as hotel room. They come up to stay with us when she wants to visit her family in the area, but she doesn’t really get along with her family, so we’re her safe space. She’s kind of an annoying house guest, so it bugs me a bit.
It’s sort of the cats’ room. Though they spend as much time in the living room.
That is awful. I wonder why the home owners couldn’t send the freeloaders away, or at least find a mutually satisfactory solution.
I’ve considered it, too. It seems like a nice idea, but problably impractical in my current situation.