Hi.
I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we're
going to talk about spare rooms.
The holidays are approaching, you may have guests coming, and you may have a spare room
that you also use as a guest room and you may have other functions going on in that
room as well.
I'm standing here in my new house in my office that I also use as a guest room.
And as you may know, I downsized drastically from 4,500 square feet to 1,600 square feet.
So I wanted to challenge myself to find the best use of space in this house and one of
the things I looked at was the functions of the room.
Now, many of you with your spare rooms may be trying to do multiple functions.
You may have a workout room in your spare room, a craft area, a scrap-booking studio,
you may be using it as an office like I do, and then when guests come you're also wanting
to use it [POP] for sleeping arrangements.
So let's think about that, because if a person sleeps here seven days out of the year that's
2% of the year.
So if someone stayed in my house up to two weeks of the year, that's still over 95% [POP]
of the time this room is not being used as a guest room.
So luckily my friends at More Space Place helped me with a solution for this, and this
is called a Murphy bed.
You may have heard of this.
They are amazing.
It looks like a cabinet that you would see holding office supplies or something, and
actually there's a queen-sized bed inside here.
So I'm going to pull this down and show you how it works.
Now I have a queen-sized bed ready for anybody to sleep on.
And when you have guests coming there are a lot of tasks you have to do in preparation.
And I just have to pull this bed down, which is luckily really easy.
You may have an air mattress you need to inflate, or you may have clutter in that spare room
or around your house, and if you need to put that clutter away, ideally I want you to deal
with it and organize it and make decisions about it, but there are some times that you
have to get ready quickly and you might need to stash.
So if you must, I want to give you a couple of guidelines.
If you have some bulky items like boxes that you need to go through, if you can push those
off to a corner and use a room divider screen to screen that off and camouflage those boxes,
that can be a very effective way to temporarily fix the guest room and make it feel a little
more hospitable for your guests.
Also if you have a lot of small items you need to corral that are scattered around that
room or around the house, please use a container that you are going to miss -- like your primary
laundry basket, for example -- so that you can put those items in it and when the guests
are gone you're going to want to get that container back and you're going to want to
go through those things and use the container again for its regular purpose.
If you have to, you can use paper sacks, you can use shopping bags, but please do not use
trash bags to stash things because you may accidentally throw some very important things
away.
I have seen that happen.
Overall, please be nice to yourself.
It's good enough, your guests are there to enjoy your company, they're not there to judge
you.
So relax, be yourself, and know that you're not perfect and neither am I, and you're going
to have a great time with your friends and family.
If you need help, we would love to help you.
We'd love to give you some accountability to get that stuff cleaned up after the guests
are gone.
So you can come into our Member Message Boards, tell us what's going on, and we will make
sure that you get it done.
And if you want a checklist that we have for a guestroom that will be memorable and hospitable
and lovely, we have that guestroom checklist on our Free Tips page.
It's at http://www.clutterdiet.com/freetips.
You can see it on the left side of the screen where we have some handouts there.
And while you're there, you can sign up to get our newsletter that comes out every Thursday
and you'll be notified of these videos and anything else we have going on.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.