If you have to book one of the rooms at a funeral home for a funeral service, you might find it helpful to follow this advice.

Have the funeral director give you a guided tour of each available room

Many funeral directors put photos of the rooms in their funeral homes on their websites so that people who need to book one of them can get a rough idea of what each room looks like. However, if you are able to do so, it would be best to see if your local funeral director could give you a guided tour of their available rooms instead of you booking one based on the images on their site.

The reason for this is that even high-quality photographs cannot always fully convey every single characteristic of a room, and you will find it much easier to pick the one that is most suitable for the funeral you're planning if you visit the funeral home's rooms in person and have a funeral director, who has detailed knowledge of each room's unique characteristics, by your side, who can help you to work out which one you should choose.

For example, if you want the funeral service to take place in the evening and would like the beautiful light of the setting sun to illuminate the casket in the room as the service takes place, you can request a tour of the funeral home at this time of day and the funeral director can show you which of the rooms get the most amount of light during this period. This is the type of information you might not be able to glean from a photograph.

Similarly, if you want to have a small choir sing at the funeral service, then you might want to tell the funeral director this and they can then show you which rooms have the best acoustics. When you're in one of these rooms, you can (if you feel comfortable enough) even try singing or speaking loudly to test out the acoustics so you know what they're like.

Try to view the rooms when the funeral home will not be occupied by lots of other customers

When arranging this viewing with the funeral director, you should ask to do this on a day when the funeral home will not be hosting lots of funeral services. The reason you should do this is that this is not the same as booking a venue for a birthday party or wedding. Viewing a room that you will use to say your farewells to someone who was very special to you may stir up some strong emotions and even cause you to cry. If this happens whilst there are many people in the funeral home, you may feel a bit embarrassed and want to leave before you have viewed all of the available rooms.

Secondly, if several of the rooms are occupied by those hosting funeral services for their loved ones, then it will be impossible for you to really examine them; instead, you would have to make do with taking a quick glance at these rooms from the entrance areas.

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