How to setup your spare room for visitors quickly

How many times has this happened to you? You have visitors coming and NO TIME to organize yourself let alone the spare room? Don’t worry I got your back! Read on for how I was able to organize a whole spare room in less than 72 hours.

Recently my husband and I purchased our “family/dream” home. It was perfect. We both work full time running our own business and have a little one running around, so we wanted something we could move into right away and not have to do much more than that.

As we have now upgraded to more bedrooms we quickly noticed that more family members wanted to stay, resulting in us sorting out our spare/guest room faster than anticipated.

My husband is one of ten siblings- yes you read correctly and no it’s not a typo - ten. So you can imagine we have many guests that want to stay.

It doesn’t help that most of his family have recently moved away. One brother got deployed. His dad got a job in another state and three siblings went on an adventure down south. So the demand for our house was even greater.

72 hours to get the spare room ready

I had about 4 days to organize the guest room from being a “spare” room where we stored all our stuff - mainly the little mans toys and things he had outgrown - and make it into a proper room with a bed so people could sleep comfortably and not be subjected to the couch, before all the family came back home for a siblings 21st.

Now, I should have mentioned our business is that of mattresses and bedroom items. Therefore, the pressure was on to make the room look showroom quality with a superior mattress as we were on trial with our family.

Why we started Mobile Mattress

I wanted good quality as our guests would be staying for longer periods of time and wanted them to be comfortable. When looking into how to complete this room I came to a realization that this is the main reason we started our business, Mobile Mattress, over 5 years ago.

We had recently been married and moved into a townhouse that we needed new bedroom items for. We noticed there was a niche in the market as all the bedroom stores websites were outdated and provided no relevant information on their products.

My husband had a back injury which required him to have 2 operations to help restore slipped disks, so it was important for us to know what the structure was of the mattress for his health benefits.

We were sick of the marketing jargon that came with the industry and noticed everyone sold the “same” type of bed. They all did the same thing and had similar properties. None really seemed suited to our Queensland climate. We need breathability in our mattresses for our heat and humidity, something those down south don't really understand too much about.

It was then and there Mobile Mattress was born. We wanted to provide as much information as possible to the consumer online and provide a great quality mattress suited to our Queensland climate without compromising on style.

I needed a specific style to suit this room as it is quite small. Because of that I wanted to keep the room really simple with just a base and mattress and then style and decorate with pillows and accessories. I wanted to keep with the softer tones of pink, white and grey to complement the room.

The Marco Bed base was a perfect match for the style I was going for. The room is quite small but since I was only going basic with the ensemble bed and not adding a headboard I knew a queen would fit in the room without compromising on space. I decided on the Naptime mattress (or as we call it, the firmer foam one) as it is a firmer feel and a very comfortable mattress.

I styled the mattress with a white linen quilt cover from Target and accessorized with white and pink pillows and a pink and white macramé pillow for added texture.

As the room was only for a spare and since I was limited with space I decided to use only 1 side for the bedside tables. I saw these creates at Ikea (and picked them up a while ago but had no use for them at the time) and liked the idea that they didn’t look like a bedside but rather a feature against the wall. I decided to stack them on top of each other for something different. Ikea no longer stock them but Kmart have similar ones.

I was able to arrange the stock from Mobile Mattress as the items I had chosen were in stock and ready for dispatch. We were able to confirm with the delivery coordinator that our items could be delivered the next day, one day before our guests arrived!