On Friday night I stood in the doorway of our third bedroom with a cup of tea and took stock: my bookkeeping desk buried under receipts, four cardboard boxes we never unpacked after the move, the Christmas bins I had dragged in from the shed a little too early, a laundry basket of outgrown clothes of Lila's, and somewhere underneath it all, a full-size bed. Ben's mom is coming to stay for Thanksgiving. I had exactly one weekend to turn this room back into a place a person would want to sleep.
It worked, mostly, and I spent about $60. Here's how the two days went.
Saturday: clear it, then clean it
Morning: everything out
I tried to tidy the room in place once before, and it doesn't work. You shuffle things from one corner to another and feel busy without making progress. This time I carried every single thing that wasn't furniture into the living room, which made Ben nervous and Pepper delighted.
Then I sorted, room by room rather than item by item:
- Back to the shed: the Christmas bins. They can come in after Thanksgiving, when they belong.
- Donate: Lila's outgrown clothes, folded into a bag and put straight in the trunk of the car so I couldn't second-guess it.
- Finally open: the four moving boxes. Two were old college textbooks and kitchen gadgets we have lived without for four years. Those went to donate too. One was photo albums, which earned a shelf in the living room. The last held Ben's old surveying field notebooks, which he wanted to keep, so they went into a plastic bin in the shed.
- The desk: receipts sorted into the client folders they belonged in, and the folders filed in the cabinet in the hall.
Afternoon: clean like a guest would look
A guest notices different things than you do. I lay down on the bed and looked up, which is how I found the dust on the ceiling fan blades and the cobweb in the corner by the window. I wiped down the fan, washed the window inside and out, vacuumed under the bed, and wiped the baseboards with a damp rag. The hardwood got a proper mop.
I also washed the mattress pad and both pillows, which had been sitting there since the summer, and flipped the mattress.
Sunday: make it comfortable
Sunday was the fun part. I tried to think about the whole stay, not just how the bed looks when the door opens.
The bed
Fresh cotton sheets, two pillows of different firmness so she can choose, and layers rather than one heavy comforter. It's mid-November and our afternoons are still in the seventies, but we've had a couple of nights near freezing already. So there's a light quilt on the bed and a wool blanket folded at the foot. I would rather she push something off than lie there cold, too polite to ask.
The small things
- A cleared surface on the nightstand, with a lamp, a small carafe and glass, and a dish for her rings and glasses.
- A few empty hangers and half the closet cleared.
- Two hooks on the back of the door for a robe and a bag. About $8.
- A basket with a set of towels, a washcloth, a new toothbrush and a travel-size lotion.
- A plug-in night light in the hall, since the bathroom is two doors down and our hall floor creaks in the dark.
- A small card with the Wi-Fi password, propped against the lamp.
- A phone charger. Everyone forgets one.
What I spent
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Door hooks | $8 |
| Hall night light | $6 |
| Wool blanket (thrifted) | $14 |
| Carafe and glass | $12 |
| Toiletries for the basket | $11 |
| Spare charger | $9 |
| Total | $60 |
What I'd do differently
My desk is still in there. I pushed it into the corner, cleared it off, and put a small vase of camellias from the side yard on it, so it reads as a writing table rather than an office. It mostly works. But the honest truth is that I'll be doing my bookkeeping at the kitchen table during her visit, and I should have planned for that before I had a client's quarterly numbers due the Monday after Thanksgiving.
I also should have started on Thursday. Two days is enough to get a room ready, but not enough to also do the grocery run and the laundry and everything else a weekend normally holds. By Sunday at five we were eating cereal for supper.
Still, when Lila wandered in on Sunday evening, she climbed onto the bed, looked around and said, "It's like a hotel." Then she asked if she could sleep there until Grandma comes. I said no. She's been in there reading every afternoon since.
