Hanging on

And praise for a well-placed hook

Thank you to everyone who became a paid subscriber last week and helped me raise money for Movement Voter Project, including Elizabeth, Melissa, Tarah, Louisa, Beth, and Sophie. I’m going to keep this going: If you decide to upgrade to a paid subscription this week, I’ll donate 20% to this pro-democracy non-profit. 

I kicked off last week’s newsletter by noting that it had been a doozy of a week for democracy. This past week has been challenging for me personally. A day after the one-year anniversary of my father-in-law’s death, my own father landed in the hospital. Please send healing thoughts and prayers his way. 

My husband, son, and I were traveling and staying with family leading up to the Fourth. Between a hotel room, guest bedrooms, and even a hospital room, I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces we inhabit temporarily, and one thing that has stood out to me is that almost every one of them could have been vastly improved by a few small things.

Chances are, if you are living small, you don’t have a dedicated guest bedroom, but that doesn’t mean you can’t maximize the space where your guests stay. And the tips below are also good advice for any bedroom—not just guest quarters. I’ve adapted a list from my second book of a few ways you can make your guests’ stay more comfortable and keep your house tidier while they’re there—a win-win situation that might just make hosting houseguests run more smoothly.

You can never have too many hooks

Hooks are a guest room’s best friend, but they are so rarely provided. In the Hotel Santa Fe, for example, the only place to hang up a wet towel was a bar hung above the toilet, so the towel sort of grazed the top of the tank (gross). With three people’s bathing suits and towels, we could have used a half a dozen hooks to avoid having things draped over doors, chairs, and doorknobs for our entire stay. 

Aim for a minimum of one hook per person. Places you can hang them include the backs of doors and the strip of wall just inside a closet. In our rental property, we installed a Shaker peg rail along one wall of the guest bedroom. If you don’t want to drill into the walls, an over-the-door hook rack or these cute self-adhesive hooks might be for you. Here a few pretty and practical hooks: