A
female
age
41-50,
anonymous
writes:A friend of mine will be having a baby shower soon and a mutual friend of ours who had volunteered to host it at her house has had to pull out so we are currently looking for somewhere to go or for someone else to host it. Unfortunately the cost is quite expensive to hire a room for a few hours and we can’t afford it between us, plus none of us has a decent size house or garden to fit everyone.Now her Aunt has kindly offered to host it at her house but unfortunately the area where she lives is very rough (when we went there in January to celebrate friends birthday a couple of our cars were vandalized, parked on the street). In addition to it being in an undesirable area with there being lots of trouble the house itself, even though is big is very unkept and dirty. We can’t even use the garden as there is so much mess everywhere. A few of us even ended up with flea bites in January - even though the woman has no pets! So none of us want to go there but we have no idea how to tell our friend as it’s so disrespectful and rude to mention these things. She keeps pushing us to agree to go to her aunts house and we keep putting her off saying we’ll sort something out.How can we politely decline holding the shower there? Reply to this Question
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female
reader, Honeypie  + ♥, writes (20 July 2023):
 Find a nice public park and have her shower?
Or take a cab/uber/taxi to and from the place so you don't have to park your car there.
A
female
reader, anonymous, writes (20 July 2023): If you find somewhere else then you can just tell her that you have found an alternative and thank her for her kind offer. If you can't find an alternative then you will have to decide whether to go to the aunts house or just cancel the shower. Of those options, what do you think your friend would prefer, seeing as you are doing this for your friend? If you are worried about your car being vandalised why not just take public transport or get dropped off? Or could you hold the shower in a public space, like a park? You could take a marquee with you in case it rains.
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A
female
reader, anonymous, writes (20 July 2023): Find somewhere else quick and tell her you chose this other place. Fleas do not live in areas where there are no cats and dogs, so it would have been some other small animal, maybe mosquitos that bit you. And they have nothing to do with mess, dirt etc.
Ok this place is not good enough for you, but you must admit that you cannot do much better and it is your baby. Why should anyone allow you to use their home for this? There would be a lot of work, mess etc for them. Most people would not let you if you paid them to hire the house and did all of the work etc yourself. So of course the only people who offer are the daft ones or the ones with very little or nothing to offer.
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A
female
reader, anonymous, writes (20 July 2023): You can't refuse BEFORE you actually find a new place.
It's as simple as that.
In the meantime you can only tell her that you can keep that as plan B.
I doubt that your friend is oblivious to the poor state her aunt's house is in. She could be however used to it. I lived in an appartment that was in a bad shape. Everything was clean, but the furniture was old, had holes in it... and it LOOKED dirty. Even though I didn't like it, and had only close friends come over, I was used to it. I had no choice.
If everything else fails, offer to "prepare the venue" clean everythng from top to bottom and get a taxi when you go over there.
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