If you are planning to buy a rental home, or you're thinking about what to do with one you have just acquired, this is the place for any questions about starting out in the rentals business.
Could anyone please share their thoughts about Duvets! I thought this would be the easy part of starting out, but now, after looking around, am unsure of whether I need to be buying bedding for allergy sufferers or whether just hollowfibre would suffice. I don't want to cut too many corners, on the other hand I need to keep a rein on the spending. Any comments would be great.
I think mine came from King of Cotton, they are allergy ones but not hollow fibre as they are meant to actually be the worse than feathers for allergies. They are the microfibre down feel ones. I went for summer weight to which one can always add blankets if it is cold. Very satisfied, plenty of good comments, wash well if necessary.
However, if you go down this road watch what blankets you choose. I should have gone for fleece, as mine molt horribly onto the duvet covers.
Thank you for such a quick reply - its great because today is my ordering day! Would it be a cheek to ask which bedlinen you went for - have got samples of 300 thread cotton ones, but these seem a pig to iron. I should have paid more attention to housekeeping lessons when I was younger I think!
I see you're in the PO, crosslandv1, so like us here one thing you really need to think about with duvets is weight. We range from pretty cold nights in winter to really hot nights in summer so bought the '4 seasons' duvets - the ones with a thin summer weight duvet and a thicker autumn/winter weight one that can be attached together to make a lovely thick duvet for the depths of winter. We do use all three permutations, though storage of the bit you're not using is, I admit, a bit of a pain (vacuum bags easiest).
Ours are synthetic (not hollowfibre but something else). Oddly the best ones came on a promo at Lidl! Cost around 50 euros, compared to over 100 euros for the others.
Thanks French Cricket - you are right we have similar considerations re temperature, although at the moment we will probably close the place up in winter, but we still get chilly evenings thats for sure.
I rather regret my bed linen - I went for percale in different colors - my cleaner tells me they are a pig to iron! If I was doing it again I would probably go for white and go for colored fleece blankets to add a splash of color & warmth. Or I would go for a nice pattern - which hides marks much better - so far those that I have replace have been in the second category.
If you get your duvets from the UK you will also need to get your linens from there as the sizes are subtly different in general. That said, some of my duvet covers cover from La Redoute and Ikea, and they have worked out fine and are better to iron. Pure cotton is definitely a good thing, and I personally like a 400+ weave, but I couldn't afford that for the gites. 20 beds in total - and you need 2 and a half lots minimum.
[quote="wallypott"]I rather regret my bed linen -
You're right 400 + is too expensive for me I'm afraid but I was looking at the 200 thread count as a possibility - perhaps I should do a testing session with the iron! I will stick to white just to make life a bit easier and, as you say, jazz it up with throws etc. Thanks again
Our linen is 3 years old now (first set provided by agency, replaced with better). We have King of Cotton 400 count, white, and it's still looking perfect. We had to get IKEA sheets for the single beds as KoC didn't do 200cm long singles at the time (they do now) and the IKEA stuff, though still OK, will need to be replaced soon, whilst the 400 linen just looks like new.
We have Ikea duvets, the 4 seasons type that you can popper together to make an extra thick one, but found people were too hot in the double thickness! We use them separately, swapping the thin summer ones for the thicker autumn ones, and let people know where they can find the extra layer to add if they need it.
Martha wrote:
We have Ikea duvets, the 4 seasons type that you can popper together to make an extra thick one, but found people were too hot in the double thickness!
This is just what I was about to mention. Surely in most rentals there is heating and so the temperature rarely drops below 16°C in the bedroom, so what is the point in double duvets? I could understand it if you were going camping.
We have the different thicknesses of duvets too, but our rentals have been, until this year, exclusively in the summer.
For this years winter rentals we made the different thicknesses available so people could choose.
We're in the PO too and in the heat of summer people find that even the thin duvets are too hot and just use the empty duvet covers.........(We put in reversible air-con last spring, so that may no longer be true if they run the air-con all night!).
If you are thinking of getting bed linen from IKEA, there are 3 within striking distance of the PO - Montpellier, Toulouse & Barcelona, but you need to be aware of the different sized pillows (and pillowcases) sold as standard at the Barcelona branch (and that French sizes are different again to UK sizes).
LV - I know! I think it's a psychological thing, people like to have thick duvets in winter. Me too, but I like a cooler bedroom at night. We have to have the place very warm in winter, (23/24) because it's cold outside, so guests feel like they need it extra warm to be cosy, which is fair enough. But then it means you really don't need the thick duvets at all.
Nevertheless we do have people adding them back in sometimes, so it's good to have them. I think we'd always need two anyway - summer ones are too thin for winter, and the autumn ones too thick for summer. You usually want a duvet even in summer here, and I don't think a single weight would work. Maybe with thick extra throws?
It's worth mentioning that we have warm throws on all the beds - maybe if we didn't have these, we would find people used thick duvets more....
I might just end up going for the one in the middle as they can always kick it off! Just jumping onto sheets - would it be awful to use easy care percale as I have just spent ages unsuccessfully ironing a 200 thread cotton - at this rate we would never get a changeover completed in time!!!
Many here disagree, but I personally use percale polycotton at my places and have never had a complaint from a guest and am quite comfy with that myself when staying there.
