If you asks anyone who knows us, they will tell you that my husband and I enjoy hosting friends and family in our home. When we lived in Hawaii for two years, we had guests stay with us every week except one. As a matter of fact, we have had house guests everywhere we have lived in the United States, which is at least ten states. Some guests would come for a few days, while others would stay for weeks.
Most people would cringe if they knew they had to host someone for longer than a day. But the truth is, there is joy in having house guests. I know this is a bold statement, considering most folks love the Ben Franklin saying, “Guests, like fish, stink after three days.” But if you prepare properly, lay some ground rules, and are flexible, having house guests could “almost” be like a vacation for you in your own hometown. It could be fun.
It’s taken years (and I’m still learning) to figure out some of the best practices for hosting guests. In this day and age of travel, it’s important to remember that although you want your home to be like a hotel, it is not. And it’s okay if it’s not perfect. But I try to have my bathrooms stocked with items 
people may need. I set up the bedroom with chargers for technology, television, extra blankets and yes, even provide suitcase racks and hangers. But when it comes down to it, your friends or family just want a clean room with a comfy bed to rest their body after a day of excitement with you… or without you. And this comfort brings you joy, because you see your guests smiling and relaxing because you made the effort to make them feel at home.
But as I said before, you should have ground rules before and when your guests arrive. Because this is what truly sets the tone for a visit and what makes the guests a joy or a pain in the you know what! My husband and I tell our guests to think of staying with us as a hotel… they can come and go as they please without feeling guilty that they must spend every minute with us. We tell them that we may cook the first few meals for them, but then they are on their own and to help themselves. It may seem to some as not very “hosty” but the fact of the matter is, this takes a great deal of stress off of the owners of the house and those that come to visit. Not everyone has the same daily routine, and this allows guests to sleep in or stay up late, eating when they need to etc. Trust me, when you live on the west coast and host an east coast friend,
getting up three hours early to cook breakfast just doesn’t seem fair to me. And when we lived in 
Hawaii… well, our guests seemed to be getting up when I was going to bed! So, we always start with ground rules that can range from use of our car, to giving them written directions for hidden gems not found in local books so that we don’t have to be tour guides to the same spot forty times a year. We have found that our guests love the ability to explore with or without us. And it brings us joy when we see them arrive back to our house excited and eager to tell us what they have discovered.
Which is why, as hosts, we try to be flexible. Sometimes we have to take care of business and our lives can’t just stop because house guests arrive. But when we aren’t doing anything, it allows us to share in adventures with our guests. Believe it or not, some guests know more about our own city than we do, and we find we are discovering something new because we were flexible in our schedule
AND flexible in allowing our guests to steer us toward an activity that we may not have thought to explore. I can’t tell you how many times we were “forced” into doing something way out of our comfort zone, only to discover we loved the adventure.
This month has been a very busy guest month in Arizona. We’ve had visitors just about every day up until now, and I can honestly say we loved it. We reacquainted ourselves with long lost friends, discovered new restaurants, antiqued shopped, hiked, played in the pool and best of all, spent hours talking about our next adventures together. It was a month of great joy and discovering that, although there’s a whole world out there to discover, sometimes staying home and hosting guests is the best discovery of all.
