How to Stop Your Guest Room from Becoming a Source of Clutter Creep

It’s lovely to have a guest room in your home, but it can easily turn into yet another place to store things you rarely or never use.

What Gets Stored in Guest Rooms?

In this category fall clothes and shoes you haven’t worn in years. Also, other household items you can’t squeeze into any of the other storage areas of your home but don’t feel ready to part with just yet.

Guest bedrooms are also sometimes used as a place to hang washing to dry or to put laundry that is waiting to be ironed or folded.

Maybe it’s where you throw your yoga kit or sports equipment when it’s not in use? Or put items that need to be repaired?

Obviously, if you’re having a clutter clearing purge, where better to stash all the things you eventually plan to donate to charity?

The problem is that most items dumped in guest bedrooms tend to take up permanent residence there, so the room is never actually available for guests.

When a Guest Arrives to Stay

When an actual guest arrives to stay, you have some urgent choices to make. You can gather up all the things you have stashed in the room and temporarily put them elsewhere (usually, in your own bedroom, because that’s the area they are least likely to see).

You can remove some of your stuff to create just enough room for them to unpack their case and store their things. Or you can simply leave everything as it is and expect your guest to put up with it.

The problem is not unique to private homes. A surprising number of landlords wantonly inflict their clutter on paying guests, too.

You won’t see it shown in any of the photos advertising the property, but when you start opening cupboards and drawers, they may very well be filled with the owner’s belongings, especially in holiday lets and Airbnb.

An immaculate one-bedroom apartment my husband and I recently stayed in turned out to have nowhere at all to store our clothes. When we asked why the closet was locked, the landlady admitted it was full of her own things. She had run out of space in her home next door and couldn’t resist using the storage area for herself.

How to Prevent Guest Room Clutter Creep

The best strategy of all is to pretend the guest room doesn’t exist. Nothing gets stored in there. It’s a clutter-free zone, only for guests.

This means that if your personal belongings won’t fit in the storage space you have available in the rest of your home, you’ve got some clutter clearing to do. And, if ever you find yourself tempted to put something in the guest room “just for now,” think again. Make it off-limits, out of bounds, strictly verboten.

“But I only have guests once or twice a year,” you may say (and even more rarely lately). “Surely, I can use the room the rest of the time?”

Well, it’s your decision. Still, clutter of any kind stored in your home will affect you in some way. The stagnant energy that accumulates around it will cause you to feel stuck in some aspect of your life.

Moreover, guest bedrooms are usually stuffed full of things you never use anyway. If you didn’t do this, would you have guests more often?

Many studies have shown that social interaction of the face-to-face kind is an important key to living a happier, longer life. In 2010, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, Utah, undertook a review of 148 of these studies, involving 308,000 people over a 7.5 year period.

Her very revealing, and somewhat surprising conclusion was that having a close circle of friends, neighbours or relatives gives a 50% better survival rate than taking more exercise, losing weight, giving up alcohol or quitting smoking. In other words, close relationships make life worth living.

So, the choice is yours ­– your clutter or your friends?

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you have a guest room where you store things? Does it make you think twice before inviting friends or relatives to stay? Please join the discussion below.