Episode 014 – Room by Room: The Bedroom

We are going Room by Room to teach you just what you Should Have and what you Must Have inside each.  This episode is the Bedroom!  Michelle is on a buying spree and has taken this as a great opportunity to pick up more properties.  While she's putting them together, she's put together a list for you of what is really important and what items are critical to have inside your Short-Term Rental.  We would love to have to add your two cents, as well.  So, please find our facebook page and add to the conversation. 

Plus, contest details are inside this episode!  Enter to win BIG!!  Go and Grow!

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening.

The BNB dash boss podcast. And in today's podcast, we're going room by room. Our show today is brought to you by audible. Audible is where you get your audio books online and get a 30 day trial into the audible membership for free. By going to audible trial.com forward slash S T R revenue. That's audible trial.com.

S T R revenue. You'll get your first audio book for free and 30 days into the audible membership just for trying us out. You'll love audible right [email protected]. You can find our $7 courses available for you to try. Find out how to cohost, how to do rental arbitrage or how to invest in real estate.

We're all three, by going to B and b-boss.com and clicking on our store. And you'll find our $7 courses right there. Try this out. You'll love it. You'll love those courses and they're only there for a limited time. So do it also, don't forget our contest. We've got our contest running right now in every week.

We're picking up. And everyone's names are going to be put into a drawing at the end for a final price of an Amazon Dodd with a little clock on it. And your guests will love that. There'll be able to walk right in, ask Alexa to connect to their account, and there'll be able to play their favorite music, ask for the weather or whatever else they want to ask Alexa to do pretty darn awesome.

And I would really greatly. You going to iTunes and leaving me a five star review. I appreciate it. So please do take a picture of it. Send it over to me at Michelle at BNB dash boss. Let me know that you did and we'll enter you in those drawings. Now let's get back to the room. What room do you think your guests will spend the majority of their time?

In what room do you think that is? Most of you guess those come on. It's the bedroom. The bedroom is so important. Now, if you have a studio apartment and you don't have a bedroom, then just take this and use what you can. You know, when we talk about the mattresses and things like that, get the most comfortable mattress you can get in that out bed or food.

Or whatever you have, you want to have the most comfortable mattress you possibly can. And if you have one of those couches, which I absolutely love, like a two, three inch rollout topper that you can put on them and make them even more comfortable. So I definitely suggest those, but we're going to talk about that.

But let's go over the list for the bedroom of things that you're going to have when you walk into a bedroom space. So when you walk into a bedroom, the very first thing, and the most important thing is going to be the mattress. The mattress that you have is going to be very, very important. And what's really cool.

Nowadays is you can get some really great mattresses for not a lot. Now I do suggest that you go to consumer reports because consumer reports did a great article on their mattresses and they did mattresses in a box and foam mattresses, and they graded all of them and then listed them by price. And literally some of the least expensive mattresses were some of the most comfortable and the highest rank.

So for like $500, you can get a very comfortable mattress in our BnBs. If you have one bedroom or more, I always suggest you have as many queen size beds as you possibly can. I don't like to have a lot of different sized beds. I don't like to have a king in this room, a queen in that room, two twins in that room.

I just, I put Queens in almost everything, unless it's one of our older properties in Florida and then I'll have a king and. And the reason why is sheets? I mean, we just try to make everything as easy as we possibly can. We will have king sized beds. Like I said, if there was a king size bed in there, when we bought the property, we will keep it.

The only time we'll put twins in there or bunk beds in there is if we think there's going to be children in there. So if it's an adult space like Las Vegas, there will be no twins in our properties in Las Vegas. Because why there's not going to be kids in Las Vegas, there's going to be a lot of couples.

And even if a whole bunch of women go together, they'll sleep together. They have no problem with it. And guys, they don't care. They'll either sleep with her friend or one of the sleep on the floor and they don't care if they're all in Vegas. We only put twins in locations where we know there are going to be kids.

And we only put bunk beds in locations where we know there might be a lot of kids. So we use a lot of queen beds. Now that's our personal preference. You can do it differently. A lot of people say, if it's a really big bedroom, they're still going to go with a king size bed. And I have no problems with that.

We have king size beds and a lot of. But when you have a lot of properties in one area, it gets to be a real challenge when you're doing laundry to separate all the different size sheets. So where you have a lot of different sized beds, I recommend that you just have somebody. So the corners of the fitted sheets with a color.

So maybe you have a read on your king size sheets and a green on your queen size sheets. And you know, the twins are easy to see you can't mistake a twin size sheet for anything, right. You can definitely put some kind of something on your sheets, on the corners. Something that gets tucked into underneath that will let people know that, oh, this is for the king size sheets and this is the queen size sheets.

If you're going to do that, otherwise you're going to have people going, oh my gosh, it gets very, very confusing when you're trying to do a lot of places with a lot of different size beds. And it's the same with the mattresses. We make sure that our mattresses are all uniform. So most of our mattresses are 10 or 12 inches.

We don't have a lot of 16 inch mattresses and we don't have a lot of nine inch mattresses. We have that in between size and that's what we stick with. And that way all our sheets. That's us. Like I said, you can do it differently, but one thing you have to make sure that you have is great mattress pad.

Now this is for you. You're going to have a mattress protector that goes around your mattress and protects it from everything bed bugs, moisture, you know, in case anything happens and it zipped up and it literally covers the entire mattress top bottom slides, everything in it, zipped up and sealed.

Perfect. The ones that are guaranteed against bedbugs are the favorite ones that we use. Then you're going to have a mattress padding that goes over that. And then you're going to have a sheet set over that. Now the sheets that we use are extremely soft. We don't use quick dry sheets, a lot of people who do that because they do their laundry onsite.

I don't have one property that does laundry on site. And I don't recommend that you do either, unless it's a place where you live, because it takes too damn long to do laundry. You're going to be there too damn long. And our cleaning crews, we want them in and out that's it. So every property has three sets of everything.

So they have three sets of sheets, three sets of towels, three sets of everything. So when we go in, we take the dirty set that set one and we put it in a bag and folded, remember we don't shake anything out anymore, right. Because of COVID. Roll it up, put it in the bag and that goes out right away. And they do a count when they're doing the towels and the sheets, they make sure they have all the pillow cases, blah, blah, blah, when they're taking off the sheets.

So all of our properties try to have one bathroom per bedroom. So if we have a two bedroom, we have a two bath. We know that when people travel together, they don't like to share bathrooms. I don't like to share bathrooms. So we do our best to always buy properties with a lot of bathrooms, unless it's a very small place.

There are some properties that we have that are three twos. We white put a set of towels in each bedroom up the end of the bed. But we're trying not to do that now because of the COVID we're trying to keep the towels in the bathroom. But just make sure that you have enough towels for all the people that are going to be there.

So when somebody walks in, they take out the sheets and take off the sheets, they make sure they count the pillow cases, blah, blah, blah. And they make sure they county everything. They roll those up because we're not shaking anything out. They put them in the bag. Then they go into the cabinet, they take out the ones that are in the cabinet.

They put those on the. And make up the beds and then they go in and they bring in whatever was brought in from last week being cleaned and put those into the cabinets or into the closets. Okay. So there's three sets in rotation, one being used, one in the weight and one being washed at all times and they just get rotated, rotate them out, rotate it.

So the same thing with the bathrooms, same thing with the kitchen towels, three sets of everything always. And that way we never have to do any kind of washing or drying onsite. And there's always something in weight there in case people need it. Everything that's in weight, we might have one extra set that's in a plastic bag with a zip tie around it so that if the seal gets broken, we know it gets broken.

So you may want to do that too. If you've got a lot of kids there, you know, somebody might wet the bed or something. There's a weight set, but we make sure that whatever we have, we have three sets for each property at all times. One being used, one being washed one in the weight. Okay. Now those sheets, like I said, we don't use the quick dry sheets.

We use super soft sheets. I don't care where you get them. We get ours online, but I don't buy online until I know the brand. The reason why is you never know how soft something is until you touch it. And I'm just one of those people. It's like, I gotta touch it. Same with my towels. I don't buy towels online and less.

I know that I've bought that brand before, because I got to feel it. It's got to feel nice and thick. It's gotta be luxurious. I don't buy cheap stuff because people can tell cheap stuff. And it's the same with our beach towels and everything that we have. Right. So our properties with pools, we don't have cheap ass towels in there.

We don't have cheap beach towels, either. The towels cost a lot and they all met. And they're there for people to use, but they are not something little flimsy, but we also let them know in the house rules that if any tells her missing, you will be charged for those towels. So we let people know, you know, do a towel count before you leave.

That's one of our checkout procedures. That just says, make sure you check, making sure you check the number of pillowcases, make sure you check the number of towels because we will. It's just one of our things, but don't go cheap, especially on sheets. You want people to have a luxurious feel? Have you ever been to the Bellagio in Las Vegas?

I'm just saying that because the Bellagio is my favorite place to stay in Vegas. My husband laughs at me because I'm always like, I don't care. Where are we go? I have stated different places. I've stayed at New York, New York when we're going to the hockey games. Cause it's right there next to the stadium and I've stayed a lot of different places, but the Blasio is definitely my favorite.

And the reason why is the Bellagio beds have the most luxurious sheets, the most luxurious pillow. The most luxurious mattresses. I mean, when you laying in bed at the Bellagio is like laying on a cloud in heaven. It's so amazing. Everything about that bed is amazing. Like you never want to get out of bed.

You just lay down. You always take a shower and shave your legs before you go in there, ladies, you know what I'm talking about, right? Because clean shaven legs and the nice clean, fresh sheets, you jump into bed and you just lay in their nurse like, oh my gosh, this is luxury. I don't want to leave this.

That is exactly how you want people to feel when they're laying in your bed. You want to spend money on those sheets? You want to spend money on the blankets, on the pillows, on the pillow, shams on the comforters. You want throw pillows, you want textures, but mostly you want that soft, luxurious feel so that people will go in there and they're just like, wow, that was the best night's sleep I ever got.

That is what you want when it comes to your bedroom. And I want you to make it look amazing too. Don't just, I mean, I've seen pictures of people with beds and they just pull the bad spread up and they put some pillows there and I'm like, dude, just some extra pillows, some pillow shams, some throw pillows, uh, you know, some texture under there.

I mean, come on, just make it look like they want to jump into it. That's what your picture should be like. And that's what the bed should be like. The first thing people should want to do when they see that bed. I just got to jump in this bed and feel this because it looks amazing. That's what you want.

Same thing with the pillows. You want some hard pillows and some soft pillows, because some people like to have hard pillows and some people like soft pillows. So we do two of each and then we have an in-between one that we have up in the closet. And that's usually with our extra set. So you can do whatever you want, but we'd like to have hard and soft so that people can have whatever pillow they want, whatever their desire you just don't want to have too soft or too.

You've got to make all the bears happy. Right? So pink Goldilocks. Think this bed's too hard. This bed's too soft. This is just right. You got to have same with the pillows. You're like, okay. I have some soft, I got some hard and I've got some just right. So make sure that you have all those kinds. And you want to make sure that your pillows are covered exactly the same way that your mattress is covered.

You want to have a waterproof bedbug protector around your pillows. Okay. So if people drool, you don't want them drooling onto your pillow. I mean, people are drilling it. In the luxurious bed that you've created for them. You don't want the moisture of that going into your pillow. So make sure you have moisture protection.

And did I say that right? Moisture protection and bug production, then you can have the nice, wonderful pillowcases on there that are nice and soft and maybe even a sham over one of her or two. Then you're going to make sure that in every bedroom that you have two nightstands, people like to have nightstands so that they can set a glass of water there or their cell phones or whatever they set next to their bed.

So you've got to have two nightstands, two lamps, and we like to get those lamps now with USBs. And if you don't get the USBs, then just get a USB charger on it. We'll have some links to those in the show notes, and then you can take those and we just stick them on the side of the nightstand and people can just plug their phone in there and charge their phone.

We also make sure everybody's got to have an alarm clock. There's a lot of places that people don't put alarm clocks. Now they're like, oh, people have alarm clocks on their phone. Yeah, they do. But sometimes their phone is dead. If your phone is dead, you at least want the option or you want to wake up in the middle of the night and see.

There's a lot of people, if they don't like a clock, they'll unplug it, but we always have an alarm clock. It's just something that you do because we have a lot of places in warm places. We also make sure that every bedroom has either a ceiling fan or we put a fan in there. Something that they can use to cool them off because Arizona's hot.

And what we think is cool, a lot of people are so like, that's still really hard. So we make sure that we have fans in case people need to call down more. And the same thing in Florida, people like fans and some people don't, if they don't like them, they can keep them off. And if they do, they will use them all the time.

Fans are great. You also want to make sure that you have lots of places to put their clothes. Obviously, we start with a luggage rack. We make sure that there's always a luggage rack in each and every closet. And that when you go into the closet, there are enough hangers. And I am an absolute perfectionist on the hangers because why?

Because there's gotta be enough hangers and they've all gotta be the same color. I don't know what it is, but I have stayed at BnB's where they threw every extra hanger in there and it just looks terrible. I don't know why it bugs me so much. But it's like, look, I don't want your leftover hangers. It feels dirty.

And yucky, just put all the white hangers in there, all the blue hangers or all the pink hangers. I don't even care what color they are, but make them all match. I don't like when they don't match, then you want to make sure that you have enough space for them to put their clothes in the drawer. So we have a dresser in every single room and sometimes there's a couple of different dressers, but we want people to have enough space to put their clothes, especially if they're going to be there any length of time, our properties in Florida, we make sure that they have enough drawer space for everybody in the house.

We're like, okay, is there a dresser here? Is there a dresser here? If they're not, I mean, we've put dressers in closets of small rooms because we're like, We'll leave this much space for them to hang stuff, but they're going to want to put stuff in drawers and people are really grateful for that. People like drawers.

So don't skimp on the drawer space. A lot of our bedrooms on the back of the doors, we'll put a full length. I read that in a book once. And I cannot remember the name of the book. And I'm wondering if it was Jasper's book, but whatever book it was, it was a great idea because people were like, oh my gosh, I love the fact that you have a full length.

Because otherwise the only mere they have is in the bathroom. So we put a full length mirror in the back of every door or on a wall, somewhere in a bedroom because it just, it's nice to have something when they're getting dressed or they're going someplace. If they're there for a funeral, if they're there for a wedding, it makes us so that everybody has someplace where they can look and get dressed.

So full length mirrors. Thank you for whoever gave me that idea. That was a great, great idea. One of my favorite things to have in a bedroom. If it's got enough room is to have a nice snuggle chair where you can snuggle up and read a book with a light next to it. And I call it a snuggle chairs. So it's big.

Or comfy enough that you can sit there and read a book, because if you're there with a whole bunch of people and you just want to kind of retreat to the bedroom, you want to have a place where you can sit in the bedroom without having to sit on the bed. So I love to have chairs in there with a little side table, a nice little lamps, so I can read if there's room for a desk.

I love to have a desk in there, but if not, it's just, the chair is enough, but a snuggled chair with the lights and a snuggle, a place. Now, if it's an upscale property, I will have a robe and slippers for the master bedroom. I don't do it in every single bedroom, just the master bedroom, but I will have a robe and slippers for them in the master bedroom.

If the master bedroom has the bathroom attached or the closet is right there, it'll obviously be in the closet, hanging up and ready for them. Those are a nice touch when you have an upscale. Also a nice touch that I've seen in some places are sleeping mask and earplugs, so that people who have trouble sleeping, or if they have to sleep during the day, maybe they worked all night or they got in early and they're not used to the time zones.

And you know, it's not dark or whatever they can put on a mask and they can put earplugs in and they won't have any of the noise from the city or anything around them bothering them so they can sleep at any time of the day. So those are nice things to have. What goes along with that are blackout curtains.

Blackout curtains are great for people who are coming from other time zones and trying to sleep way off schedule. So they might just want to go to sleep and they need something to keep out the light. They just want it as dark as they possibly can. So blackout curtains are really great to have in one bedroom properties or in the master bedrooms of any property.

And then the bedroom is also the place where we leave our gift. So if we have a gift bag, the gift bags are going to be left on the dressers or on the beds. And some of our places that are lower priced, we leave a bookmarker with our logo and stuff on it that usually has a flower. The upscale properties have gift bags with little gifts inside of them.

All of those are left on the bed in the bedroom, depending on the amount of money people are paying and the length of stay. We never liked to spend more than 10% of one night. So. It's a hundred dollars a night. Your gift bags should usually be around $10. And I don't mean, you know, little cheap stuff. I mean, make it nice stuff, but around $10 now that's our rule of thumb.

Sometimes we spend a little bit more and if somebody's there a little bit longer, we might have different things in there, but we get a lot of stuff and I've covered this on the other shows where we get our. But we get our headphones and things like that, all on Ali-Baba and we get some really cool stuff for very, very little money.

So for $10 people get a lot of stuff and they think we've spent probably 50 bucks on each of those. So sometimes they look in a gift bag and they're like, holy cow, they spent the whole night stay on this gift bag and we have. It's just, we've gotten really great prices and we've gotten them all at one time.

So those are really, really good things. All right. So that's our bedroom for the next couple of weeks. We're just going to go over each and every room and tell you how we're doing that room. But we decided to start with the bedroom because honestly it's really the most important. And if there's something that you put in your bedroom that we missed, I would love to hear that.

So do me a favor, drop us a line on our Facebook page under this episode and let us know, or just leave a post all by yourself and tell us, Hey, Michelle, you missed this. I would love to hear it because any kind of improvement we can do, that would be absolutely fantastic. I'd love to hear what you do, what you do differently in how you.

That's what makes all our BnBs special? People stay at B and B's because it's not a hotel. So what do you have? What do you offer? That's different than anyone else? Tell us about it. All right. Thanks for listening today. Hey, if you can go to iTunes and leave us a five star review there, I'd love to get your feed.

If there's something we can do to improve. I'd love to hear that too. And if there's something you want to hear about, drop us a line, just go to our website. It's bnb-boss.com. It will redirect you to B N B B O S S E s.com, which is BNB bosses. So again, thanks for listening this week. We're going to drop another episode and we're going to go on to another.

How we're fixing it up. So thanks for listening. God bless you. Hey, stay safe. Go and grow.