Wednesday, November 2, 2011

My Albatross Room

From now on, the "bonus" room will be called the Albatross Room because calling it a bonus room implies good things. A bonus is something extra, something above and beyond, something that could be construed as a gift or reward. Our bonus room is not any of those things. It is an Albatross around our neck.

Seven plus years ago, we moved into this glorious fixer upper old house, with it's one bathroom, three bedrooms and a bonus room. The bonus room is upstairs, more of an attic storage area that someone floored, stretching across half the house. It is huge and completely unusable for anything other than storing attic things, but as we stood on the bouncy floor, we saw the potential.

This would make a great play room. Or a family room. Or a master bedroom. Our ideas were grand, including the promise of gables punching out the sloping roof. Someday.

Well, seven years later, it's still a storage room. Only now it's got sheet rock up and new flooring ready to install and a new window and it's not even close to being done. We've had a storage unit for two years, with the idea if we weren't storing things in the bonus room, it would be finished faster.

Apparently, renting a storage unit is just another excuse for us to get even more junk to store in the bonus room. But now we are serious. We letting our unit go, we are finishing the floor upstairs, we are determined to get this Albatross Room back into it's dream potential of being a true bonus room.....

Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I'm excited again. I think this time, unlike all the previous times we've thought we were close to finishing it, this time we really will! Seven years too late to be a playroom, but just in time to be a hangout for teenagers. I'm thinking the room never wanted to be a kid room, but thinks teens and scary movies and all it's creaking floor glory will be just about perfect.

But until the floor is finished and the furniture moved back in to be used and not just stored, I will think of it as my Albatross Room. Our past records shows a shocking lack of stick-to-itiveness!

1 comment:

  1. B. will totally come to help! You need to finish this room before D leaves for college!

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