This Journey » IdealReality: First Room Edition

Ideal<->Reality: First Room Edition

I’m jumping in feet first with this idea from Peter Walsh (h/t Colleen The Communicatrix) about articulating what you WANT your life to be like before you tackle getting your home to embody that. This little series will be a description of what I want for a particular room accompanied by the before pictures. Later, (this year sometime) I’ll follow-up with the After pictures.

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The room you enter when you walk through the front door is a bit amorphous for me. I know how we’re using it now (as a catch all for back-packs and shoes and dog kennels and whatever) but how I’d like to use it, I’m not quite sure.

Part of the problem is what to call it! Is it a foyer? Not exactly. A hall way? No. It’s not a front room or a living room, nor is it a parlor. When the house was first built it was closed off by a swinging door to the kitchen and pocket doors to the living room. That made it a room you have to go through to get to the stairs but that buffered the rest of the house from the cold air coming in when people came in and out.

But that was all 100 years ago, when houses were partitioned off into little rooms that could be heated separately. What do I want it to be in the 21st century is the question.

I feel like I want to continue the idea of this being an introduction to my home. A welcoming place and another transition place. It is the Grand Central Station of the house. Guests and family welcomed and bade farewell.

I sort of want it to just be open and clean and maybe have a nice place to sit and read a book or play a board game. But I wonder if that corner with the shelf and the dog kennel might be a place for a little desk and a bill-paying/mail center. (There’s not really another place for it and it tends to spread over all flat surfaces.)