What are the plans in the next few months with the other rooms? If you are going to make one an office and the other a guest room for now AND have furniture in them, I wouldn't think anything of it. However, if you are going to literally have empty rooms and are just putting her in the smallest room for when you have more children one day... it seems a little mean to me.

How old is your SD? If she’ll be aging out in the next 3-5 years, i would lean toward a bigger room. If she’s still young and you have plans as mentioned above, then I would think the smaller room is fine.

Use the smallest room as the spare room. Honestly what is wrong with giving her and future kid a big room. Who knows as she gets older maybe she will want to spend more time there. How old is she?

I think the smaller room will be fine. If you start this out as you intend to continue she'll settle in ok. Let her select the paint from a handful of possible samples you're good with and make a big thing of getting it ready and welcoming.

Even in a smaller room she'll have space to grow with shelves on wall and maybe a daybed to start (I liked daybed for my girls as I could slide totes under the bed skirt with toys, colors and color books, play-dough and whatnot... different color totes for each playtime activity). As your SD ages you can go with a loft bed with a desk for laptop/homework and such. My girls liked to do their beds up all girly girl during the day with fun pillows and stuffed animals and my youngest daughter had string lights (pink) around the Priscilla curtains.

Unless Dad and/or you make a big deal over the small room being smaller than the two remaining other rooms, she may not give it much thought. Right now no one else is in those rooms she'd feel she was competing with. As new babies arrive, baby stuff takes up room (no one wants baby supplies scattered all over) so a larger room is needed along with a rocker for Mom. Natural for all the baby 'junk' to go in the other rooms.

Important thing is to make the room her space from the get go. Unless you're talking shoebox size room compared to the other two rooms, she should do fine. She'll have the furniture but she won't have as much daily 'stuff' someone living there 30 days a month would.

I'm big on each child having a "their space", where their things are kept and they can snuggle up comfy and read and tuck away their little treasures. I know growing up I had a GF who had a sister and three brothers. The kids had a grand total of two bedrooms. Two beds in one for the girls, the beds in one for the boys. But each kid has a 'their space and their things'... it was somethimes like 'hey, that's my space, get back on your side'. But it worked for them all. The parents in that home had the small bedroom. Lol.

It's your choice Depending on how you want to use the rooms!

I get she's not there too often, my only concern would be making her feel like she's less welcome if you're just keeping an empty spare room vs. letting her have it. Might make her feel a little bit side-stepped or something.

I also understand wanting the extra space though since hers is likely to lay totally untouched for a majority of the month!

How old is SD? That could be a deciding factor. If she's still younger then I don't see any issue whatsoever with the smaller room, especially since you're planning on doing a reassessment if she starts living with you more! As stated above though, if she's semi-close to aging out, you may not have a use for both rooms before she does, so it might make sense to give her the larger room for the little bit she'll still be coming consistently.

If you were making this decision as an intact family of origin, it wouldn't matter at all, right?

Your house - your decision.

She's 6. Why would a 6 year old even notice or care that her room is slightly smaller... can't imagine the room is THAT much smaller? I agree with above, just make it cute, and tailored to her.

I agree with your thinking that it's better to put her in the room you want her in once your family expands, vs. putting her in bigger room and then shuffling her around because of new baby. I think THAT would make a kid feel bad.

What does your DH say/ think?

It doesn’t matter which room you give her. She’s only there a few days a month. I wouldn’t imagine she even has that much stuff at your house since she’s not there often. My stepdaughters are teenagers now and the amount of stuff they have at our home has dwindled down to almost nothing. Even with both of them sharing a room, it’s still mostly empty. I wasted too much energy stressing over that kind of stuff when they were younger... turned out it really doesn’t matter.

whatever decision we make seems to be perceived as wrong by others and people are so judgey of step situations

Yep. I guess I was/am the worst step mother, ever. My SD was 5 (now, 26) when I started dating DH and I never made or questioned a decision based on whether I would be accused of hating SD because she wasn't mine. I never even thought about it, because her being my step did not influence my decisions. If other people thought that, well, I couldn't control that and never felt the need to constantly explain myself.

There are LOTS of ways to make a small room fun AND roomy. When I was a 8, my Dad built me a "loft" bed. The head of the bed was actually attached to a bookcase, so I had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. I used the shelf right at bed-level to keep my radio-alarm-clock and books I was reading. The foot of the loft bed had a ladder up the end, but the one corner of the bed was built on top of a 5-drawer dresser. The bed was high enough, that I had a school desk under there, and all kinds of neat things. It was my Aladdin's cave, my hideout...any number of fun things.

Just because a room is small doesn't make it a bad thing.

She should have the Master with master bath, I MEAN en suite. THAT is what HRNYC would say bahhhhhhh

Miss ya hrnyc, miss you bunches.

I've had this issue MULTIPLE times with both my bios and SKs. And in my experience, I think in order to be perceived as treating SKs fairly, you have to go over and above what you would for your bios. You can relegate your own bios to a smaller space, and no one will say anything, but if you do it with your SKs, you're treating them unfairly. It just IS that way, and it's one of the many downsides of step-life, IMHO.

For example, when DH and I bought our 1st house together, like you, we had no bios. He had SSs then 3 and 5, EOW, 4 nights a month at best (if they didn't have to skip due to some activity BM had them in that they COULD NOT miss.) The house had 4 BRS with a master bedroom, two small bedrooms side by side and a HUGE bedroom across the hall that happened to have really nice "sports" them border (wallpaper was big back then!) Since it was decorated for a boy, we gave it to SSs without a second thought, and they had a queen bed (their preference),window seat, dresser and still spacious floor space. When our first DS was born a couple years later, we had to give him one of the tiny bedrooms, which was filled to capacity with his crib, changing table, chest of drawers and toys. I was quite resentful over seeing that big beautiful room across the hall sit empty for the majority of the month, sometimes the whole month, but I dealt with it, knowing we could not re-locate SSs to a smaller bedroom without major fallout.

Fast forward 10 years. DH and I built 2 brand new houses 2 years apart. Both times, SSs had all but stopped coming, so we gave them a shared medium-sized room (twin beds by then.) By then, we had a 2nd DS bio. and both times, we gave the larger bedroom to our oldest DS over our youngest DS and thought nothing of it. In our last house, oldest DS even had a LARGE separate media room with leather movie theater seats as his "teen hangout room" that adjoined his bedroom and bathroom suite. Our youngest had the smallest bedroom in the house and no one said a word. When we bought our current house, this time, we gave youngest DS the larger bedroom which has a huge walk-in closet that doubles as a "play room" because we felt he needed more space. Our now teenage DS got a smaller bedroom. And neither of them really complained, and of course, no one ever commented on it like they would if one of our DSs was a SK. I wish I had advice, but I don't have any. I guess now that SKs are grown, I'm glad we can say we treated them the best we could, at times to the detriment of my and DH's bios. Again, I hate that it has to be that way, but it's reality.

SS has the smallest room in our house.

Only reason is, my son's room is in the basement... my girls share the bigger bedroom... we have the master... and ss is left with the smaller room.

It was never even a question for us. That's the way I arranged it when DH moved in. As in... I said... Here DH, I cleared out this room for SS.

Back when I only had 1 kid, there were 3 bedrooms in the house. The master, and a large room and a small room. My son got the small room, because we had a better use for the larger room at the time.

My son was 16 months old when my daughter was born, and the plan was to move my son in the larger room and my daughter into the smaller room, which was decorated as a generic nursery... but my aunt moved in and ended up living with me for 8 months... so SHE got the larger room and both kids were in the smaller room. It worked just fine. Because they were both under 2 there wasn't much "stuff", and I had a "play area" elsewhere in the house, I took out the closet doors - the crib fit perfectly in the closet, and the toddler bed and 2 small IKEA dressers still left plenty of room if needed.

After my aunt moved out, my son was moved into the larger room and my daughter stayed in the nursery.

When my 3rd was born, she stayed in our room for the first few months... then I split from their dad and got a new house.

In the new house, the 2 girls shared the larger room, and my son had the smaller room.

Whatever works for your family. If you have a better use for the larger rooms, then use them. It's YOUR home, not SD's.... as she gets older you might want to revisit, though, and/or when you expand your family... because as she gets older, she will need more space, and will likely be asking the type of questions about why a 6, 7, 10, 12 year old has the tiny room while the baby has the biggest one, kwim?