I figure it was used for 45 days last year. One son spends a week here every winter. It also houses the printer and loads of books. I like having my own bathroom that I don’t have to fight with my wife for space (as I do when we have visitors. So yes it is worth it to us.
I think having two bathrooms is essential to the longevity of a marriage. It ought to be included in the wedding vows.
This is so interesting… 
I can’t honestly relate to even one idea expressed here. It’s very self-aware of you to know this about yourself. You must have been raised in a very welcoming home. My parents did not have one hospitable bone between the two of them.
Have you considered that some of your house guests would rather stay in a nice, nearby motel (does not have to be a deluxe hotel 
) where they can watch whatever they want on TV, walk around naked, clean out the minibar, and be excused from having to share a bathroom with your teens/toddlers, but THEY are afraid of hurting YOUR feelings by telling you? It might – in some instances – be MORE generous to let guests stay where they will be the most comfortable than to insist they sleep on your old hide-a-bed so you can feel hospitable. (That came out snarkier than I meant… I’m sure YOUR guest room is beautifully appointed.)
ThelmaLou slinks away, still thinking…
Depends on how often you expect to have visitors; and on how important it is to you to have them actually in your house, instead of spending significant chunks of available visiting time elsewhere. (Or, of course, in the other direction if you’d rather have an excuse to tell them to go to a hotel.)
And I think a high percentage of people who have a guest room do use it for other things when there are no guests; if only as a place to store out-of-season items, or put the new cat while waiting for the others to get used to the idea.
Plus which – what if you wind up needing/wanting an in-home caregiver, but don’t need to have someone be awake all night? Having a room available for them to sleep in could be very useful.
It makes total sense to me and I’m very introverted.
When my family comes to visit some of them stay in an area B&B by their choice. I haven’t said a word to them about it and wouldn’t, but it makes me feel left out, somehow, even though they spend a significant portion of each day here. I may only want them here for three days but I want them staying here while they’re here. – the ones who stayed in their camper due to allergies didn’t cause that reaction, because they parked the camper here on this property, all of which feels like home to me; not just the house.
Oh, no question about it, that’s certainly what I’d rather do when visiting! As I think about it, the problem only comes up if I DID actually have a spare room but didn’t want them to stay there. If I didn’t have a place for them (some very annoying “old friends” might insist that they can sleep on the couch perhaps), then it’s just a matter of saying “oh please come visit, I want to see you so much that I’ll spring for your hotel.” Then of course there would be the usual wrestling over who should pay, but either way it works out better if you don’t have a place for them anyway.
Eventually this is likely to be extremely valuable, if the situation with my partner’s 96-year-old mom is any example. She does have a spare room (well, she did, she died last week) and it has been occupied by overnight caregivers for the last year or so.
Oh my. I’m sorry for y’all’s loss.
Thanks for your gracious reply to my sort of tacky post.
I’m also sorry for your loss!
Thank you. Her experience was very on-topic: She and my partner’s dad moved into their really excellent facility (LaSalle Village in Newton MA) about 10 or 15 years ago and both immediately declared that they should have done it much sooner (this after a very challenging period trying to coax them out of their house). His dementia worsened rapidly and he died shortly after they moved in, but she’s been very happy socially, recreationally, and support-systemsly.
One unusual feature of LaSalle Village is that it’s located on a college campus and residents are encouraged to take as many classes as they want. My partner’s mom took a class every term and was taking a very fun creative writing class when she passed. She had a great run and was a model for us - I think we’ll be much less inclined to overstay our homeownership.
What an incredibly uplifting story! That gave me goosebumps all over. 
I hear this all the time!
You should definitely do it while you still have a choice, before you’re “under the gun,” and while you are still somewhat able-bodied and compos mentis.
And this often preceded that move:
“Aging in place” is way overrated IMHO. Those cheery commercials are misleading.
Looking for a facility that is associated with a college is a brilliant idea. We do have one here in town and it’s also a faith-based non-profit. Win-win!
Our house has a failing septic system, we have to leave time in between showers and laundry loads (and keep the showers short). Our whole neighborhood is going through this; we should have sewer by 2028. But in the meantime, we really can’t open our home to overnight guests. That sucks because I miss the relaxed, impromptu conversations you get with a friend you’re sharing your space with for a day or three. But we really have no choice.
Upon reflection…this is certainly true, and my parents did not possess or show any of this to anyone (not even me, really). But you are right. I actually do have some of that quality, but I had to observe it in others’ lives and homes first and then consciously and intentionally cultivate it in myself.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ponder this… 
First off, my condolences on the loss of your partner’s mother.
I just do it. Years ago my late wife and I I bought a 2-bedroom 900SF condo. And since we both did WFH office work, one bedroom was ours and one was the dedicated office filled with desks, filing cabinets, desktop PCs with huge CRT monitors, etc. We called it “the submarine” because it was that dense with stuff. There certainly wasn’t room to even lay a sleeping bag on the floor in there.
So zero space for guests. When her Mom or my Dad & wife or her sister and teen kids or … wanted to visit, we parked them in the nearest hotel since there simply was no other choice.
It certainly helped that we lived in a walkable urban neighborhood with 2 hotels within a couple blocks. We could have those lingering late night convos, then walk them back to their hotel & leave them in their lobby. Or send them home on their own later in the visit. Then meet up tomorrow after everyone was cleaned up and had eaten breakfast. Very simple.
Aaah. That is different.
I lived in the above-mentioned condo for almost 10 years. We probably didn’t get 45 days of guest(s) total in those 10 years.
Which is not to say I’ve never had a guest in my residence. I had one brother live with us for about a year after he left the Navy and was casting about for a career-quality job. And one niece lived with us in a different residence for about 6 months after she’d returned from a couple years overseas and also needed time to get settled. So it’s not like I am (or was) an utterly selfish shit about it. But we had the extra room(s) in those places for reasons other than guesting.
For sure a second bathroom is handy. I now live by myself in a 1BR 1BA apartment. When a GF comes over for 2 or 3 days I really notice how much underfoot they (and their lotions and potions) are in the bathroom more than anywhere else in the house. The results are pretty, but their body maintenance and beauty process is labor- and product-intensive.
Hi Sis! 
Yeah. As said above, when I had excess rooms for other reasons I was certainly willing to have guests stay over for days or weeks or months. But I wasn’t going to go buy a residence with that extra space for them just in case. The idea I’m obligated somehow to buy an extra room for a nebulous collection of possible future visitors seems off to me. Even, or perhaps especially, if it’s my subconscious supplying the obligation.
Now there is some real wisdom I had not considered.
My mother had a guest bedroom. She used it as her office, and as storage. (Lots of books, office supplies, the printer, …) When my brother visited, he stayed there. And when she decided to hire a full time aide instead of moving to assisted living, the aide lived there.
When i bought this house, i was moving away from my MIL, and a requirement (to me!) was that we had a guest bedroom she could stay in. She didn’t drive. Staying in a nearby motel would have been horribly inconvenient for everyone. She has passed away, but we still use it a few days a year for guests. And it’s also the library, the room for the third bridge table when we host our neighborhood duplicate game, a room my husband sometimes retreats to when he’s working (he has a standing desk in his office, sometimes he wants a couch) a room the cats like to hang out in, and also, yes, it’s the room where we foster cats, and where new cats live while they are acclimatizing.
I’m happy to have that extra room. Maybe, when my daughter moves out, I’ll have more room than I’m using, though.
Makes total sense. The part that I trip up on is that they want to visit, but you’re going to pay for their motel. Do you explain to them that it’s really saving you money since you aren’t paying extra rent for a guest room? I can see that with close friends and family this could become “a thing” and doesn’t need to be discussed, but when Pat from your college soccer team comes to town I imagine a conversation like:
Pat: “Hey LSL, I’m going on a road trip and would love to come stay with you for a day or two on my way through.”
LSL: “Great! We don’t have room but I’ll put you up at the motel around the corner. It’ll be good to see you.”
It ALMOST clicks, but I still pause at the notion that you’re going to lay out cash for their room. I have no such reservations about paying for nice meals out or show tickets, I’m not sure why their room seems different to me.
I agree it feels a little different. Buying someone’s restaurant meal feels different from buying their groceries or paper products.
My explanation was always along the lines of “We’d love to have you. But we feel guilty. We don’t have a guest place, but we sure don’t want our cheapass-ness to result in you having to buy a hotel room. Let us treat you with some of the money we saved on the smaller house.”
Works well for fairly clinical, logical, or business-oriented personalities, even if those personalities are also dear old Mom or Dad.
OTOH, for somebody where it’s all about the emotional touchy-feelies of hospitality, or worse yet the absolute necessity of strict conformance to God’s Laws, errr, I mean Emily Post’s drivel, well … that would go over about like a 3-month old beaver carcass at a wedding rehearsal dinner.
The rest of it is real wisdom too.
It’s just that it’s wisdom that fits some people and not others; and it doesn’t fit you. It’s also wisdom to realize that this sort of variation is common, in all sorts of areas, and is not a problem to be fixed.
My subconscious is just as much me as my rational mind is.
I mean, being able to be hospitable makes me happy. That’s what money is for. I really like being able to tell people, “we have a guest bedroom, drop me a note of you are ever in the area”. There’s no way I’d shell out for a hotel room for most of those people. Even though I’ll only actually host one in ten of them. But cleaning up the spare room, and telling the cats to hang out somewhere else for a few days, is something i can offer to ask if them, without it feeling weird.
I have to say that I don’t think guests are really visiting if they don’t stay with us. It Is just entirely different.
Interesting…
Yeah, I’m already starting to gather info on independent-living facilities in the area, even though I expect it to be seven or eight years before we would actually move to one.
The big reason to wait is that we adopted the Firebug fairly late in life, after it was finally clear after multiple miscarriages that it was time to give up on the usual route to parenthood. So he’s 18 and is starting community college next month. I remember after finishing college, I was in and out of my parents’ houses (plural; they were divorced by then) off and on for a couple of years before finally becoming self-supporting around age 24. I figure we owe the kiddo a similar interval when he’s trying to spread his wings, when he can still come back home if he needs to. But independent living communities for 55+ (or whatever) people generally don’t allow one’s grown children for more than the occasional overnight visit, if that.
So we’ve got some time before any such move, and I’ll be doing my research.
I too live in an Independent Living retirement complex, and still pinch myself about getting so lucky!
Long story, I ended up homeless late last year, resorting to ‘couch surfing’ at a friend’s house in a tiny town in regional Victoria. Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I approached all the local housing services (in a bigger town nearby) and was advised to put in an application here to rent a villa unit. Which I did. And just a few weeks later (I was expecting to wait months if not years for a vacancy) received a phone call saying they had a unit available if I was still interested. YOU BET I WAS 
The independent units (also not-for-profit, but also non religiously affiliated) are part of a larger complex that includes assisted living and nursing-care facilities if needed. The staff, including all the grounds and maintenance staff are amazing. My rent here is cheaper than I could get even in a share-house ($912 AUD per month) and the unit is spacious, with a large living area, smallish kitchen, large bedroom and bathroom-cum-laundry. It was refurbished before I moved in, so new carpet and paint-job, and the oven/stove etc are virtually brand new. I pay my own utilities, but they too are fairly reasonable.
My immediate neighbours and I get together each afternoon for a glass of wine/beer/cuppa and a chin-wag which is quite pleasant really…otherwise I could go days without talking to anybody except shop-keepers! Of course, I could also join in with the community activities, but being such a misanthrope generally, it’s not really up my alley.
I still drive, but there is a bus-stop outside the front gate of the complex that runs regular services into the main town (only 5 min away anyway) for when I choose to go carless. The town is a decent size with all the services I need, including a public hospital literally across the road that I have been frequenting recently for specialist services. There is a train service to Melbourne (app 3 hours away) and the fares are ridiculously cheap, so no need to drive and battle the freeway traffic! It’s actually been a number of years now since I have driven in Melbourne, and the mere thought of it brings me out in a cold sweat.
So, I think I might be happy to see out my days here. I can afford to live without any privations, and in fact have more disposable income (being on a pension now) than when I was working full time. Still looking forward to travelling overseas again in the not too distant future, and knowing now that I have my own place to come home to makes it even easier.
Independent Living Units get the thumbs-up from me.