When you’re furnishing your first home, moving into a new home, or making additions to your current home, you’ll want to plan to accommodate occasional overnight guests. When family or friends from out of town come to visit, you want their stay to be fun and comfortable. If you’ve ever had to sleep on a sofa, you know that it’s not usually a comfortable option.
Accommodating a sleeping guest for a child can be as easy as throwing an air mattress on the floor. Or when buying a bed for your child, you can choose a bunk bed, trundle bed, or traditional twin or queen bed if the room can accommodate it. A set of bunk beds can usually be arranged as two single beds and as one bed over the other. A trundle bed has a second bed under the main bed that opens like a drawer. My sister used to sleep on a couch when she visited her daughter and her twin grandsons. Now they have bought trundle beds for each child and now she sleeps on a trundle bed. Of course, she has to take turns sleeping with each child.
There are adult guest bed options to suit a variety of space and price needs. These include sleeper sofas, futons, Murphy beds, rollaway beds, stackable memory foam mattresses, and air mattresses.
A good quality sofa bed for your living room or family room can be a good option if you don’t have a spare room that you can decorate as a guest room. You can buy a traditional sofa that folds out to make a bed, or you can get a futon. Although originally introduced to the US as inexpensive, temporary furniture, today’s futons can be as comfortable and stylish as you can afford. They come in many styles and price ranges and the frames are made of wood or metal.
The traditional folding bed has also been modernized to meet the demands of the 21st century. A comfortable mattress stores upright on the bed frame and can be rolled up in a storage area such as a closet or garage. Air mattresses have also come a long way from the camping mattress many of us remember from childhood. Now called air beds, they come raised to near normal bed height and in a queen size. You can also get them with pillow tops. The purchase price normally includes a travel bag, a patch repair kit, and a pump.