Holiday Cabin Getting too Cramped?

Holiday Visitors becoming a problem? Cramped quarters and bodies all over the floor…

For years, our family made our one bedroom ski haven in Whistler work with 8 family members squeezed in over the Christmas and New Year Holidays. Bodies lay strewn all over the floor among the ski boots, skis, tinsel and long johns occupying prime ski-cabin real-estate. Just getting to the bathroom at night was like walking through a landmine zone without any kind of space saving furniture.

Even though it was a tight fit with family, friends begged to ski a day and stay a night and my Grandmother seemed to be making endless plates of pasta to feed the growing throngs. The trick with skiing holidays with family and friends is organization. Extreme organization. My Grandmother adopted a strict policy of one basket per person. In that basket was your stuff. No digging into other people’s baskets for gloves that have wandered off. If you lost gloves or goggles in the chaos of the après, then you went without until they turned up in the “general basket”.

We had one clunky old fashioned, heavy pull-down murphy bed in the living room, a lumpy futon that got stuck every time it needed to be put in sleep mode and had to be kicked to make it drop down and a foamy on the floor if you got lucky. The rest of us were in sleeping bags. The only two who ever got marginally better sleep were my parents who had the only queen bed and the white noise machine to blot out us rowdy teens, and the brawlers from the nightclub down the road.

Recently we have reconfigured this same 80’s one bedroom and now have functional beds and storage for everyone except maybe the hangers-ons! Along walls both short or long are a variety of contemporary smooth operating wall beds. Some versions are wall bed sofas and have sofas which don’t have to be moved and double as lounging areas during the day. At night the bed levers over the sofa and the coffee table without even having to move anything out the way. Tables pop up and fold out and are not occupying the entire area with dining space. A sofabed unfolds to to provide a comfortable sleep without backache in the morning. Storage beds fit the mountains of equipment and warm clothing and hide them from view.