Rooms

Anyone who has read my other blogs should have picked up on the fact that I am a somewhat non-traditional person.  It would be an easy assumption to think that I would live in a non-traditional house. No, I do not live in a tree house nor do I live in on a houseboat.  Our home is  surprisingly traditional in style. It is not exactly a ranch nor is it the typical bungalow. It is a 3 bedroom brick home built in the mid 1950's.  There is no separate den so but the living room is the living room. The dining room is the dinning room, and it is often used, though not on a daily basis.  The bathrooms are bathrooms. Our bedroom is our bedroom. Of course, the kitchen does its duty as the kitchen.

From that point forward nothing is as is should be.  One bedroom serves as our study. Anne and I spend countless hours there browsing the Internet.  It is not really an office, nor is it a den.  It houses several hundred books, but is not a library either.  For sure it is not a bedroom as was intended. 

For most folks, especially old folks like us, the guest room is almost formal, often closed off, and only entered for the purpose of vacuuming or dusting whether it is needed or not.  No, that is not our guest room. It does occasionally house a guests, but it is definitely not a guest room in the pure sense nor does it have the spirit associated with a guest room.  When Axel is home, it becomes Axel's room. His stuff is there whether or not he is here or not on any given day.  After school and during the summer, it becomes Jonathan's room where he hangs out and does what most seven year old boys do.  He watches television, plays his Nintendo, and sometimes reads.   The guest room often serves as a den. Axel sometimes entertains his friends there watching movies, or I may be chilling out there watching television when I don't want to watch what Anne is watching in the living room. On days Rosemary is out of school and visiting here, she sometimes takes it over as her personal space as well. So the back bedroom is guest room, Axel's room, Jonathan's room, a den or family room.  O yeah, we have extra linens stored in my grandmother's old blanket chest.  Anne and I use it for the overflow of some of our clothes as well.  Our guest room is uses daily in some way or another and is one of the busy spots of our home.

Some time ago we enclosed the screen porch off the kitchen. It was a typical side porch found on many houses of the period.  Our intent was to make it a simple sun room.  The washer and dryer were inconveniently located in the basement so the sunroom became the laundry room. Since the kitchen is just a wee bit short of storage space we decided to assign pantry duty to what was then the sunroom, laundry room, pantry.  There was space to add an easy chair and antique loveseat to make it a sitting room or more formally a keeping room.  Anne and her Aunt Doris are often there as well as many guests who just drop in for a visit. Rosemary often reads or does some of her art work there. We are never sure what to call the room but since the basic color is red, we just call it the red room or the laundry room or the pantry or the sitting room or the keeping room, and sometimes we even refer to it as the porch.  No matter what we call it, anyone who has seen that room knows of which room we are speaking.

While our traditional house is a non-traditional home, one thing is sure.  It is alive and has it's own unique soul and is among the most blessed homes to be found anywhere.