Her map is the thing you are protecting
A blind senior dog does not navigate your home by bravery; she navigates by a learned map — distances counted in paces, furniture edges memorised, scents and air currents marking doorways — and by the confidence that the map is true. The aim is not to cancel the event; it is to change the room in ways her map-making can absorb.
Start from a principle that surprises people: a blind dog copes far better with a room rearranged completely and relearned than with small, repeated shifts she never gets to survey. One planned change, introduced properly, beats a week of small, unannounced shifts.
Move early, move once, and anchor what matters
Make the changes as early as you can — the day before beats the morning of — and then stop. If her bed must move, that becomes the event you manage most carefully, walking her to the new spot repeatedly from familiar landmarks until she can find it cold.
Around the anchors, keep walkways genuinely clear. Fewer, larger arrangements with wide honest gaps give her a room she can cross with her tail up.
Walk her through the new room before anyone arrives
With the room finished, bring her in on a lead in the quiet and let her survey it at her speed. Do a few purposeful journeys: bed to water, bed to door, door to her event-day spot, rewarding her at each arrival until the routes feel travelled rather than theoretical.
Add cues she can use when you are not beside her: a mat with a familiar scent at her bed, a textured runner along a key route, a softly ticking clock or low radio near her resting place as a sound beacon. Keep the cues identical through the event so the information she gathered in rehearsal stays true when the room fills with voices.
Her place during the event itself
Give her a protected station inside the room — her bed against a wall, behind a piece of furniture that will not move, with water and a chew — rather than shutting her away from a gathering she can hear and smell. A blind dog exiled to another room often frets at the closed door; a blind dog with a known bed in the corner can participate by presence and retreat into sleep by choice.
Brief the guests, especially children and anyone carrying chairs: nothing gets moved, bags and shoes do not land in walkways, and nobody calls her across the room through the furniture — go to her instead. Ask people to speak before touching her, since a hand arriving out of the dark startles even a confident dog, and in a noisy room she has fewer warnings than usual.
After the event: restore the map or re-teach it
When the guests leave, either put the room back exactly as it was — genuinely exactly, bed, chairs, and rugs returned to their remembered coordinates — or, if the new layout is staying, accept that it is now the map and give her the same guided tours over the following days until her movement relaxes again. Watch her confidence as your measure: a dog travelling freely at her normal pace has the map; a dog creeping along walls needs more rehearsal and possibly fewer obstacles.
Check in the days after for the quiet costs of the event — bruising from a collision, broken sleep, reluctance to enter the room — because a senior body reports these things slowly.
One shared layout, kept by everyone
The plan only holds if nobody freelances — a helpful relative shifting a chair 'back a bit' mid-event undoes her morning's learning. Note her anchors, routes and cues, and hold the no-moving rule, so the whole household protects the same map in the same way. Ahead of the event, her profile is open to the relatives you pick in KinsLe Family Sharing.