The Guest Room

I only recently moved into a new house . . . the third address I have had since MSO Rin and the Boy purchased their abode, actually!  The Husband and I designed this house and had it built to our specs, and I really love it.  It's a good size for our family, but not so big that I can't keep up with cleaning it.  We have a comfortably large master bedroom, a study perfect for when we work from home (which we both do often), a small and efficient kitchen with cream colored cabinets and hardwood floors, and just exactly the right amount of rooms.

That said, we just moved into this place after about a decade of being povertous (that's a word I just made up) graduate students.  We had to take the furniture from our medium-sized grad student apartment and use it to furnish two places - the Husband's small bachelor pad in the town where he works during the week, and our glorious new house.  So our glorious new house is still gloriously empty.

The formal living room is unfurnished - full right now of the boys' junk.  The dining room has a table and chairs in it, but no pictures, no buffet, and it looks decidedly unfinished.  Our master bedroom has a king mattress and box springs on the floor - I use a dining room chair as a bedside table, and the Husband uses an upturned milk crate.  The boys' room is fairly complete, but still lacking a chest of drawers and a toy box to corral the pile of toys that I am constantly fighting to keep from overtaking my life.  There are no rugs in any of the rooms, no pictures on most of the walls.

This is not a complaint.  I love my house, and I think it's wonderful that we have years of choosing and picking and supplementing and decorating ahead of us.  I'm very domestic, I like nesting, and adding this-or-that item that I picked up from a thrift store or craft fair or vacation is one of the major ways I express my creativity. It's nice to know I have years of that ahead of me, and have something to work toward, and we have already begun adding a bit here, a bit there.  However.  It echoes in here a bit.  Sometimes it kinda feels like a warehouse.  I hate my "bedside table" - I will cop to that complaint.  I'd love for my bed to be up off the ground.

Which is why the guest room is my favorite room.  At the top of the stairs, down the hall from the boys' room and the upstairs bath, is a decent-sized guest room that is the only fully furnished room in the house.  It contains the 1920s furniture suite that we received as a gift from my husband's grandparents - a family heirloom, purchased new by his grandmother's mother.  In the old apartment, this was our master bedroom furniture.  The bed is just a full size, which is why we moved it to "guest room" status - it is very hard to share a full bed with another adult.  (People must have been smaller a hundred years ago.)

The furniture is old but well-made - it's been painted a few colors over the years, and is now a dark gray blue.  But some of the old layers of paint show through - it's a legitimate "shabby chic" that you'd pay a lot of money to have faked on a Pottery Barn piece.  A chest of drawers, a vanity table, a small rocker, side table, and full bed grace this room.  There is a lamp on each bedside table.  There are pictures on every wall - pretty much every decent picture from our old house is in here, because their small size is proportionate to the room (whereas they'd be swallowed up and look odd on any of the larger downstairs walls).  I have a lovely table clock, some pictures, an old shabby suitcase and hat box - I even put a cookie jar in there full of Ghirardelli chocolate squares.

Sometimes, when I feel a little alienated by my echoing, empty downstairs, I go upstairs and lay on the guest bed.  It gives me a feeling of control, and of being settled.  It's a cute room, cozy and old and with links to my husband's family's past.  Although virtually everything in it was given to us, it's all stuff I would have picked out myself if I had gone shopping in an antique mall.

Unlike MSO, I don't hang out in my favorite room much.  But I do like knowing it's there.