The thing I forgot I hate about houseguests

I’ll validate you. I hate a warm house. We rarely even use the heater.

LOL. The thing I hate about houseguests (which is typically my son and his partner) is that after they leave, every single picture on the walls needs to be straightened up. How they manage to knock them all askew is beyond me...they are 30-something grown men, not crazy kids!

I am staying in a hotel for possibly the next month until I get possession of the house I just purchased. I am loving having total control over the temperature in my room - AND having it respond so quickly since the room is small. It seemed to take forever to cool down my California house when I would come home and turn the air conditioning on. And I know a lot of that was because I had these giant vaulted ceilings. And great big windows that let the sun bake through. They were super high windows that I just never had coverings made for. It was fine most of the year, until a really hot day when the sun would bake through those windows in the late afternoon. The first vent in the ceiling lineup went into my family room and I used to sit in the recliner right under that vent to get cooled down until the rest of the house caught up.

When my Tennessee parents come to visit they complain about not being warm enough, even in July. When we visit them we keep our mouths shut despite the fact that we are sweating in their house, in August. It why I prefer hotels.

One of my bffs keeps their house at 63 as year round as possible. I can’t go there. I certainly don’t want 80 but it’s just too cold for me.

Then there’s my in-laws whose house is so hot we won’t stay overnight.

We are the opposite. I try to remember to turn the temperature down when I have guests because I know people are typically used to their houses cooler than we keep ours particularly in summer. It helps if I'm cooking a lot because then I get a little warm and it is a reminder.

Our friends and family know to dress warmly when they visit us. We also keep cardigans, warm socks and a heated blanket available. Plus we try to remember to turn it up a few degrees; but we keep our temp at 65, up from 63, so I recognize it is a bit extreme. Our house is known as “the icebox.”

Our AC simply doesn't cool the house more than about 20 degrees under the outside temperature, so on hot summer days, we can't keep it at our preferred 72. More like 78. All of the three houses we've had here, both old and brand new, had the same issue, so I'm always surprised to hear people in the south say they keep their house in the 60s. I'm like, how?!? Haha.

In the winter if it dips below 70 in the house overnight we bump the heat on first thing in the morning just to take the chill off. Otherwise the heat stays between 65-68 if it's on. For a lot of the winter we don't need to run it.

This makes me think of the first time I took my babies home to my parents' house in Nebraska in the winter. My dad liked to keep the house at like 59 or something. Very chilly. He made a big deal out of turning the heat up to 65 so "the grandkids are comfortable," and I rolled my eyes and reminded him that he had no qualms about freezing his own children all the years we were growing up. He just smiled and bumped it up another degree.

I don't have a lot of years of memories of my parents being grandparents because they died so young, so that one is precious.