Bed, Bath and Beyond

This week: If you could remodel/redecorate any room in your house which room would you choose and what would you do to it?

One room?

Of course you are going to expect me to say the kitchen, and you’d probably be right. The wall oven is too small. The cabinets have seen better days and the worst is that they have a number of deep corners that are so difficult to get to that I actually, after many years, knocked out the back of the one that faces the dining area and left it open so that I could use the space well. Although we have a good number of cabinets, I have a good number of dishes, bakeware and like to keep everything I need to cook well on hand, so I would open up the dead space between the cabinets and the ceiling, or extend them all the way up. I recently stumbled across the coolest designs for cabinets that not only pull out, but pull down. (Of course, I could just continue to use my step stool!)

On the other hand, we have one room that is paneled and I considered it a ‘den’, but a realtor friend told me that since it has a closet, it is technically a bedroom. It’s just inside the side door, (the one we always use), and across from the laundry room. It is in an opposite hall from the other three bedrooms and far from the baths, (one in the hall, one in the master bedroom). I had lined it in bookshelves and called it “the library”, which we still do. I used it as a classroom when I homeschooled my sons, but at one point I had dispersed some of the bookcases around the house to put our daybed, which I had used as a sofa, in there. No matter how I covered it, no matter how I had ‘throw’ and not ‘bed’ pillows on it, Kentuckians refused to sit on a bed; (I had guests  who would stay standing or fight over the chairs).

It came in handy for out-of-town guests, but  the daybed moved to another bedroom and the “library” has become a catch-all room. Given my way, I would put in real shelving and cabinetry and make it a proper library, and I would make an entrance from the living room into it, (which I have wanted to for many years).

Speaking of the laundry room, I would move out the hardware and add a sewing table, but despite our large garage, The Husband insists that a lot stays in the house; at least I make him take it out of the bedroom when I find car parts there. I would also add a laundry tub/sink. The double sink in the kitchen are too small for cleaning many things, so I have to take them outside.
Perhaps I would put the furnace in there. Someone, (not me), must crawl under the house to change the filter, and the only side of the house that does not have a door has the circuit breaker box.

What kind of lunatics built this place?

The closets are terribly small. When we left our townhouse in Colorado, the realtor who bought it for himself listed the usual ‘what stays with the house’, (i.e. stove, refrigerator, dishwasher), but also added “walk-in closet”. Our sons’ bedroom had a wall-long closet but our room had a real walk-in; how the man expected that I could not leave it is beyond me. I wish that I could have figured out how to take it, because  we have our clothes crammed into our little closet here, with a little help from a cedar closet.
(When I told my brother about the buyer listing the closet in the sales agreement, he told me to superglue the door to the closet shut and make the man think that I took it with me.)

I would make my en suite bathtub here bigger. It’s very awkward to take a bath in it and I haven’t done so in a long time. I have a chair that I can use in the shower when necessary.

Not that I dislike this house. There were few to choose from at the time I needed to buy, (there are hundreds now), and it has a nice-sized yard. The yard is overgrown now, which we like. The house is a solid brick ranch, which is what I really needed, so there is little outside upkeep and only a couple of steps at any entrance, plus, it’s a ranch style, which I need. It is in a fairly convenient location, and we have only one neighbor’s house that is very close. I am fortunate to have it,

and now it is all paid off. It’s mine, all mine.

What I always wanted to do was make a sunroom, or at least a well-windowed room off of the back door. There is a concrete patio ‘slab’ just past the full glass door with matching glass window next to it, which is off the dining area, (next to the kitchen area). It is far too buggy here to truly enjoy the outdoors except during the earliest part of the day, but I do enjoy the garden the birds, chipmunks, bunnies and the occasional other small wildlife. (I never saw a deer in the yard, but saw one’s tracks in the snow once.) I could sit there and read, or do handiwork, or just gaze and the cats, who no longer go outdoors, would love it. I could also put in a fireplace or the woodstove that The Husband always wanted, but there is no practical area to put it in the house, no matter how much we tried to find one.

But first of all, I would rip out the carpeting. Except for the entrance hall, the good-sized kitchen-dining area, laundry and bathrooms, there is carpeting without flooring underneath. Every time the money was available, something else came up. If I never had to clean another carpet again, it would be too soon.

So, if I got a windfall, where would it go? If it were big enough, even a major lottery, I would probably move, but I would also redo this entire house, because, despite its flaws, it has served me well.

It is home.

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