This week is all about plugging along… After two weeks of illness, I’ve got to push and prod myself every step of the way to get these chores done. That said, I’m starting to feel a bit of the ol’ rhythm when it comes to my morning and evening routines. My ironing got done yesterday - all except for a blouse I forgot about that had been drying in the bathroom - and I did a little marketing this evening. My aunt is in town for a conference, and my sister and I will be making dinner for her tomorrow night. At my sister’s house, thank goodness! I may have made some progress in housekeeping since November, but my home is still far from ready to do any entertaining. At any rate, that means I’ll need to push my weekly bedroom cleaning forward to Friday evening and my new mission to Saturday morning.
It’s been a while now since I cleaned my bedroom, and I’m actually looking forward to putting it back to rights. Since I don’t have all that much in the way of news this evening, I thought I’d share this wonderful description of how the ideal guest room should be furnished from Lily Haxworth Wallace’s New American Etiquette (1941). I think we all deserve to feel as good as we’d try to make a guest feel in our homes. How do your bedrooms measure up to the ideal guest room?
Bedrooms should be liberally equipped with lights. The central bulb should operate from a switch that can easily be reached on entering the room. There should be a bed light, two, if the room has twin beds. A lamp should be above the sofa or chaise longue for reading. The bed and sofa lights should operate on individual switches.
The room should have shutters and shades so that every bit of the early morning sun can be kept out of the room if one likes to sleep late in complete darkness.
The bed or beds should be comfortable and should be well equipped with sheets, blankets (plenty of them), and a quilt. There should be two pillows, one hard and the other soft. There should be a bed light over each bed to satisfy those who like to read themselves to sleep.
Any bells for calling servants should be placed so that they can be sounded without getting out of bed.
There should always be a bedside table on top of which there should be an accurate alarm clock. The table should also hold a small tray with a glass and spoon, a thermos bottle of cold water, and a hot-water bottle or electric pad. A flashlight or candle should be beside the bed for service in the event of a breakdown in the house lighting supply.
The closet should not be the storage space for miscellaneous articles. It should have sufficient shelves and hangers for all the clothes it will hold. There should be hat stands for the women and trouser hangers for the men. Shoe trees should be amply supplied. If riding is a practice, there should be a bootjack.
There should be at least one lounging chair in the room and a sofa with comfortable cushions. They should be so placed that the light from the window is right for reading. A lamp should be near by for night reading.
A dressing table should be so placed that it receives satisfactory light from the window during the day and should have lights properly arranged for use after dark.
In the days of midsummer an electric fan is a welcome addition to the equipment of a hot room.
Mirrors should be in as many places as possible. There should be at least one of full length and the others should be placed so that they are at the proper height and receive good light.
A writing desk should be equipped with note paper, envelopes, ink, pens, pencils, stamps, blotters, and a calendar. Beside it there should be a waste basket.
10 comments:
Wow! Well, I certainly couldn't supply the guests with a bell to call servants nor would they need a bootjack to get riding boots off LOL! But I suppose those of the upper crust would have found much of this quite handy :)
I can provide a calling bell, but someone else will need to provide the servants!
I do have a bootjack, though (I used to ride ;-) but I'd have to scrounge up a horse for them somewhere.
Oh, please, please Lily Haxworth Wallace, invite me to stay in your guest room!
Wow! Our bedrooms are hardly big enough for the bed and dresser. I only wish we had room for a sofa and chair in them. Then I could retreat to my room when the kidlets have taken over the house with their toys and enthusiasm. :)
But the ideal guest room does sound like something I could aspire to for our own comfort.
If somebody rang a bell to call servants in my house, they'd be waiting a long, long time!
My bedroom, too, isn't big enough to fit much more than a bed and a bedside table (though I don't keep it right at my bedside). I think she makes some good tips about light, though, and mirrors and closets. In this day and age, it's almost more useful to provide your guests with internet access and a charging station than it is to furnish their rooms with a writing desk!
I have to agree most emphatically about the light switch available to turn on the overhead light as you walk into the room. I have a 100 year old house and while I love Prairie Craftsman style, the order of the day was to hang a cord from the center of the ceiling light that has to be pulled to turn on the light! I have two bedrooms left to be rewired to a switch and they both drive everyone crazy. You walk into the dark rooms and hit the side of the wall looking for the light switch, but there isn't one, so you wander around the center of the room waving your hand in the air hoping to find the hanging cord to tug for the light! Horrible! And what a comedy, bumping around in the dark waving your hands in the air looking for the hanging cord!
I want this in my OWN bedroom! Along with the servants.
As I read this, I realized how I am really beginning to think in this time period. As, I want to make over a guest room in my house. I sort of had these ideas listed here running through my mind to provide for my guest. Being in 1955 has made me really want to play hostess and to share with others. The concept of thinking of a guest is beginning to seem normal. Then I thought, well, really minus the servants bell, I do have these things in my own room. Since my project has started I have added and made our room more livable. It seems so second nature now to make sure that we try and live comfortably, that I was at first thinking of any future guests and of course I could, because I had already thought to just, naturally, make it nice for hubby and I. These are really my 1955 concepts and I like that I am taking them on. They will hopefully stick around after 1955 is over.
Don't you love those bedspreads!
Oh, and I checked with my inflation caculator using the year 1944 and these blankets would cost about the equivalent of 60.00 dollars today, which is probably pretty much the same we would pay. However, we have ebay, so we could even pay less!
prairieknitter, the worst are rooms where the light switch is badly placed. Not just to your left or right as you enter the room, but in some odd location. Electricians are getting really good about standardizing where to place these light switches so we could all make our way around a dark house - even if it's not our own - but when they were new...
Susie Q, I think we should all have bedrooms that feel as luxurious as the best guest rooms we've enjoyed!
50s gal, I love the bedspreads! One thing I'd like to do after I buy myself a new blanket or two is to start folding my quilt down to the end of my bed when I'm using it. So the quilt gets less wear and tear, less soiling, and the blankets do all the work.
Post a Comment