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The list I use before a room goes live. Six sections, no fluff, nothing on it I have not bought and put in a house that real guests slept in.
You are furnishing a room for people who will pay to sleep in it, and you would like to stop discovering what you forgot by reading it in a review. That is the whole audience.
It works for a first rental, a room you are refreshing, or a spare bedroom you are about to list. Most of it is cheap. The expensive mistakes are the ones you make by not knowing they were on a list.
Six sections · 61 items
Mattress, layers, pillow counts — and how many decorative pillows is too many.
What the five-star reviews are actually about. Light gaps, noise, a second set of sheets.
The most common complaint I see, and the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Guests unpack. If there is nowhere to put things, they tell you about it.
The things that get named in reviews rather than just noticed.
Non-negotiable, and increasingly checked by the platforms themselves.
One email with the PDF attached. No sequence you have to escape from, and you can leave whenever you like.
I have furnished six short-term rentals and run them myself since 2018. The houses have earned more than five hundred five-star reviews between them, and every item on this checklist is there because leaving it out cost me something — a complaint, a replacement, or a night I had to refund.
If you want the room-by-room version with what everything cost, that is here, and the actual products are here.
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