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Hello fellow homeshare hosts! I’ve always allowed open use of my house including the kitchen, living room, and dining room. When guests arrive I tell them that they are welcome to use these areas. Most guests choose to stay in their rooms, even for meals, and I have designed my rooms so that guests have sleeping, sitting, and working areas since I know most guests prefer privacy. I don’t mind guests eating at the dining table or sitting on the couch for brief periods, but I have a guest now who is taking my invitation a bit too far. One night she had her work spread out over half my dining table even into the dinner time hours, and today she’s curled up on my couch reading for hours. It’s my first day off in weeks and I just want some privacy but feel like this guest is overusing my common areas and pushing me to stay in my room. She seems annoyed when i come into the common areas and doesn’t say hi or any niceties. I know this is partly my fault because I told her common spaces were available to guests, but I thought she’d be out most of the time as she’s supposedly here to see family.
What do other homeshare hosts do to prevent overuse of their living and dining areas? Do you limit the hours of use for the common areas? I don’t have an office or any other area to retreat to other than my small bedroom which has no seating area, so I really do rely on using the common areas to work or relax when I’m home. I want my house to seem friendly without a lot of rules, but I’ve had a couple of guests that really take advantage of my hospitality and my home.
When I did homeshare I didn’t do anything and I did have a few who hung around too much in “my” space. So I added onto my home and now they don’t have use of my home. It only took a few to bring me to that point, LOL. I also think limiting length of stay can help keep guests from getting too comfortable.
Perhaps you will have to go to a model of guests have no use of common areas and then you can waive that on a case by case basis once you meet the guest. Or limit it to times you aren’t home if you are away a lot. Or block off days that you have off on your calendar to give yourself a break.
We mention in our listing and in person as we show guests around that the common areas are shared with us and with any other guests. That has seemed to prevent the problem.
We have three sizable living areas in our house for common areas, and my husband and I have our bedroom as well as an office and our library to ourselves. Having extra space really does help.
And one more thing: We recently installed Roku TVs in our two guestrooms. Now we never have any trouble with guests trying to watch TV in our family room or our atrium.
I allow full kitchen use, as well as guests being free to use the outdoor terrace dining area. But I have never offered use of my living room. If it’s a nice, respectful guest who is staying for awhile, I’ll mention that they are welcome to watch any of the many movies I have and make themselves comfortable in the living room, but I do that on a case by case basis. I’ve actually only ever had one guest take me up on it.
Just because one home-shares doesn’t mean guests need to have access to your whole house apart from your bedroom. Just make sure they have things like a desk and a comfy chair in their room so they don’t have any reason to need to spread out all over your dining table.
In my homeshare days, guests were allowed only into their rooms, the bathrooms and the dining room. All other areas were off limits and this fact was pointed out to them when they arrived.
I don’t think that limiting the time they can spend in common areas is a very practical solution as it makes the place seem more like a jail or (at best) a strict boarding school.
I prefer it to be one way or the other, not a half-hearted solution. Some guests will spend hardly no time at all in common areas, other guests will use them a lot. It’s swings and roundabouts.
I’m lucky in that my location and the reason people come here is to have a beach vacation. So even though it’s a 20 minute walk to town and the beach, guests are mostly out and about all day and when they are here, they generally hang out in their room or on the balcony just outside their door unless they are in the kitchen preparing some food. And they’ve all been respectfu about kitchen use. Also, the guest room/bathroom has a separate entrance-they don’t have to walk through my living room, or kitchen to enter their space. All that means that guests are never really intruding on my space. And having raised 3 kids in Canada and having had a house there that was centrally located where friends and famly would often drop by, I’m quite used to having people around, it doesn’t really bother me.
I think the most annoying thing for home-share hosts, apart from guests who take over common space and just hang around all day, are the type of guests who book a home-share, yet have poor social skills and/or seemingly don’t even want to have to relate the host whose home they are in- I only had one guest like this, and it was rather uncomfortable for me.
The first time I had a creepy guest hang out in the living room and she was obviously waiting patiently for me to get home to start following me around and chatting with me, I took the living room off of the list of accessible spaces to guests. Usually I have been inviting them to use common areas on a case by case basis. With this current guest, the first and only message she sent was “can I use the living room?” I have to start listening to my gut when guests send out red flags!! She became much more friendly and open after I asked her to tell me about herself before I accepted her reservation, so I did invite her to use the living room but now am kind of regretting it. I invited her to do laundry since it’s a 10 day stay and she proceeded to take mine out of the dryer and fold it so she could get hers done (not just any clothes, these are my underwear!!).
I don’t offer washing machine use even though my average guest stay is a week-10 days. What I do is ask the guest, when I’m going to do a load of wash, if they have any small things they’d like to add to the wash. They seem to appreciate that and I avoid someone using it improperly or washing 3 items with the machine set on “full load”. Since I live where it’s warm, most guests are oufitted in shorts and t-shirts, or little summer dresses, so they don’t end up with much dirty laundry anyway.
At least your guest was considerate enough to fold your laundry instead of just putting it in a heap on top of the dryer
I allow all common spaces for guests at my shared space listing, but now have limited my max number of nights to five since having some particularly trying/house hogging guests this past summer. My home is open concept, so it’s very difficult to limit certain rooms. I also changed the wording in my listing from “full use of the the kitchen” to “prepping light meals and snacks”. One morning I literally couldn’t find a free space on my counter to make a cup of coffee! I provide one half of the bottom shelf of the fridge for guests; that limits how much they can store here, and that has helped with limiting kitchen use, also.
Most guests don’t spend time at the house (I am in the lakes and mountains region of my state, with plenty of outside draws), but the few that do are generally pretty respectful. The small handful that hang out help me practice my patience and fake smile . . . and remind me that this is, indeed, a job!
We learned the hard way that limit-setting is required for sustainable on-site hosting.
For background:
Hosting in our family home since 2014. 3 bedrooms -initially one listing offering accommodation for up to 6, now each listed separately.Seldom have more than one paying group at a time but often have family,friends and other non paying guests concurrently. Have a small second living area which is designated for guests use and has fridge/ tea and coffee facilties.
When we started we offered kitchen use as an amenity. Our kitchen is contiguous with our living and dining rooms - open plan nightmare. Most of our guests did not avail themselves - this city is a foodie paradise and most people want to eat out. But not the 3 generation family of 6, the grand matriach of which mistrusted all food prepared by others and insisted on cooking (wok, deep frying, maximal splatter, maximal smell) breakfast, lunch and dinner. They also used the washer and dryer almost continuously for unconscionably small loads ( one T shirt and a pair of socks ). Just because it was there.
After this group we removed kitchen (breakfast aside)and laundry amenities from our listing. We allow favoured guests to use them on a case by case basis.
While most guests will not exploit one’s hospitality and have a sense of boundaries, there are outliers who need limits set at the outset to avoid 1.the need for uncomfortable behaviour correction or 2.murderous seething resentment on the part of the host .
Our guests are welcome to use our common spaces, but I warn them that occasionally our living room or some other space will be in use. My husband and I occasionally teach privately so we need to give our students privacy while they are here. Guests traveling together are the most apt to wander about when their companions are sleeping, making calls, or doing some kind of work.
I don’t give guests use of our kitchen or our sitting room, but the dining room is designated for guest use only. We are fortunate that the sitting room is large enough for our own dining area, and the guest dining room is too large for our everyday use anyway.
I provide breakfast, which sort of formalises the arrangement. I have a small fridge in the dining room together with tea, coffee and a kettle.
I don’t let guests eat in their rooms if I can help it, and my HRs are strict on this, including drinks other than water.
I can only think of two sets of guests who haven’t “got it”.
