If you watch enough home décor shows and read enough housekeeping magazines, you’ll pick up lots of tips on how to be a gracious host.

And if you follow those recommendations, you’ll have a dedicated guest room that is tastefully decorated and perhaps doubles as a home office but is otherwise untouched during everyday life with a complete set of matching furniture, a mini-fridge in the corner, new toothbrushes in the bathroom vanity, and a just-released paperback book and a fresh box of chocolates on the night stand.

Well, people who know us well enough to be invited to our home know that we aren’t made of money. And until we can afford to finish the basement, we get buy on 1,000 square feet of living space.

So what do we do when we have guests? (Yes, my daughter brought a college friend home for Easter weekend.):

• If these are guests who deserve or expect a hotel-quality overnight stay, we don’t pretend to be able to offer such accommodations. Instead, we recommend which hotels they can stay at near our home. In one such case, I helped arrange for the reservations.
• Overnight guests can use our daughter’s room when she is away to college. But if guests stay at our home when our daughter is also home, they’ll be sleeping on the floor. They are informed of this arrangement ahead of time. We do have plenty of extra blankets and pillows. One couple that comes up every year brings their own queen-size air bed and puts that up in our dining room. This week, I bought a twin-size air bed that will fit in the daughter’s room.
• Because we live so close to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, we always offer to help with airport shuttles. There were two times when a relative who was traveling in and out of the airport stayed overnight at our home so they could catch an early flight. On another occasion, a relative parked his car at our house and we drove him back and forth so he could avoid long-term airport parking fees during his trip.
• We keep the house clean and presentable on a regular basis, and do a bit of extra effort when we expect company. For example: will a polite guest complain if I haven’t changed the kitchen shelf paper in four years? No. But if they help themselves to a coffee cup or open the trash cupboard, they would notice if the shelf paper is dingy and torn. And, after a time, the paper needs replacing. That’s why one of my recent projects has been working through the kitchen to repaper the cabinets.
• We serve our food on stoneware matching pattern dishes and cups, and not just when company is visiting. That’s our everyday dinnerware. How did we manage that luxury on a budget? The collection was built up over four years of birthday and Christmas gifts from my grandmother, aunt and mother-in-law.
• We don’t have a “kid-proof” home anymore, but we try to be “kid friendly” when my siblings bring their younger children for a visit. I have a baby gate to block off the entrance to the basement and a toddlers’ sippy cup in my cupboard. There’s also a box of toys, crayons and sidewalk chalk that we have available to entertain children who visit.
• We also we try to serve something “local” with the food for out-of-town guests. Tiffany’s Pizza is one of our favorite standbys because it’s not a national chain pizza that our guests would be familiar with from their hometowns. And for this weekend, I bought flavored coffee beans from Café Classics to grind and perk into coffee at home.