Here's ours:
She says that when she was a child, no house which considered itself a house was without one. When it wasn't being used for guests, the visiting sewing woman might use the room for dress-making and sick children might 'take their fairy tales and coloring books and do their convalescent squirming in that state apartment.' But in the sixties, she says, it seems to have disappeared.
"Have our houses grown smaller, our families larger since the antique days I almost remember? Do guests come to stay less frequently? Or have we turned more self-indulgent and inhospitable than our ancestors?"
She says yes to all of them. She also points out that people who can drive a hundred miles out and back again just for dinner are not people who require lodging elsewhere for a night. She also says that we moderns 'are all more jealous of privacy, less willing to be incommoded than were our grandparents. Read a Victorian novel and gasp at the amount and the duration of the visiting which went on before autombiles." Or, she suggests, read Jane Austen's own letters, which refer to family visits months long in duration. She says she has seen the Chawton Austen home, and that it is so small people must have slept on the sofa or had trundle beds in the drawing room. "Creature comforts did not count so much as the welcoming door."
I've rearranged a few times since these pics, and while the bed is still in the same place, there's a table with a hutch full of books jutted up against the left outside leg, and a bookcase and hutch against the wall at the foot of the bed with more books on the ledge to the left of the window.
Even when we didn't have a guestroom, these are things I like to make available in whatever space we give to an overnight guest:
Pillow
Blankets, and information about where extra blankets are
Fan in summer
a small basket with a pincusion, safety pins, needle and thread and buttons; scissors; stationary; pen and pencil; bookmark; a book or two I think might interest the guest; lotion; kleenex.
Towels, washclothes
bathroom stocked with shampoo, conditioner, spare razors, women's toiletry items, and extra rolls of toilet paper.
Places we have put extra guests:
Children's rooms
living room couch
mattress on floor in the sunroom
Our room
futons in various rooms
the floor
a camping trailer parked out in the yard
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