Ok people don’t go there. I am not referring to adult playrooms of the Fifty-Shades-of-Grey variety. If you follow my blog, you know that I am lacking a sex drive. I am referring to a room where an adult gets to leave his or her stuff laying around. Where they can make messes, work on projects, or just go to be by themselves.
The Doc and I each have such a room. That’s what can happen when you are empty nesters with a couple of rooms to spare. We are lucky that we have rooms to spare and are still able to have guests sleep over. We don’t have a lot of guests, but we have a lot of room. And since we have the rooms, we might as well use them on a daily basis. And I have to tell you that this is a really good thing. We spend a lot of time in our respective playrooms.
My room is my former work-at-home office, which is now a little-bit-of-everything sort of room. There is often a jigsaw puzzle on the go on a drafting table. My obsolete macbook that I still compose my blog on is plugged into a large monitor on my desk. Then there is a puzzle box and a lap desk stacked up just a quarter turn away where I use my ipad and a blue tooth keyboard to actually publish my blogs. If I need to pull out my rarely-used sewing machine or serger, I move all the stuff piled on an old desk in the corner that my dad made years and years ago and set them up there. There are sentimental trinkets, mostly elephants from a long-ago collection, family photos and an odd assortment of books covering topics from graphic design, to gardening, to yoga. The rest of my books–my collection of fiction–is housed on a bookshelf in our family room. There are things that I intend to donate but haven’t gotten around to, things I plan to give away and also haven’t gotten around to, like an old AGFA scanner that still works, and there is a cordless vacuum recharging in the corner. It is my room for doing and storing stuff. It is a big reason why the rest of my house looks so neat.
The Doc’s room is JT’s former playroom, which was repainted when it no longer housed lego and action figures. This room is not considered a real room by building standards because there isn’t any window, but it is a very useful room and extends to under the stairs to provide a great storage area. Our Christmas decorations are kept there, as well as our skates and a lot of The Doc’s fishing stuff. The Doc uses his room to make fishing rods, tie flies, practice the guitar and to get away from me when I am driving him crazy. It does have a door. He also uses it to store stuff and pile stuff and put stuff that he may get around to putting somewhere else eventually. This room is also a big reason why the rest of the house looks so neat. It is a smaller version of our not-so-neat garage.
So basically we both use our respective rooms, and the garage in the same way. And we have no desire to give them up. In the past we talked about what would happen and where would we end up as we aged. The Doc is nine years older than me. But really we have decided that we don’t want to be anywhere else. Here we have a great house on a beautiful lake that offers us so much enjoyment. Here we have things to do that keep us feeling younger and fitter. Here we each have a room of our own to do with what we please. We couldn’t image downsizing and moving to an apartment or condo and giving it all up. So as of now it is not in the game plan. As of now, and for the foreseeable future, we are keeping our messy adult playrooms.
Thank you for reading.
Photos: Jenn Stone
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I love your playrooms and think they are an absolute necessity. And I wouldn’t want to leave a house on a lake either.
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Especially if so want to kayak when I am 80.
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If my house was on a lake I believe I would be a much happier and relaxed person 😁. Have a wonderful weekend. 🙂
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Yes living here has really made my life calmer and happier. A good reason to stay put. I would be miserable anywhere else.
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I so get this, having one of my own. My wife is much neater than me and tolerates my one-room pigsty. It’s not even my man-cave. We sleep in separate rooms because we both snore so loudly that we disturb one another. It would have been hilarious if someone stuck a hidden camera in our bedroom (not because of the sex, but because of the number of times we gently turned each other over in the night). 🤣 When it gets too messy, I do actually get embarrassed and clean it. She has no such room because she could never live in such a cluttered spot. She likes order in her life, but it’s one of those things that husbands and wives tolerate of each other. There are a few quirky things she does too, but that’s another story.
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I like a neat house; but in order to be neat, I need a place where I can still be messy. Luckily we have that space. We snore as well but my husband gets to remove hearing aids. I get frustrated and end up giving him a push to roll over. I do like the idea of separate rooms…
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The one thing that insisted on when we were looking for a new house, is that I am not interested in downsizing. I wanted room for our different hobbies and for guests. It sounds like you have a perfect house and garden and there is no reason to leave! Enjoy!
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Exactly! I don’t understand why they think people should give up things when they age. So happy you found a place that works for you.
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I’m not sure I could have such a room, but I can see why you would never want to leave where you are currently living. It seems to suit your needs, plus you’ve got the lake…
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Yes and now I have stopped worrying about having to leave before the time comes. I always needed a plan A and a plan B so I was dwelling on this. Now I am just planning on staying as long as possible.
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it must be nice to have that decision settled; we are still thinking about where we would like to retire to…
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I use my half of my attic pretty much for all that (and I’m still using my Canon film scanner as I still use film). I was also using my old Windows XP laptop for posting my blog posts (and nearly everything else as the modern Windows 10 machine can’t do much really) but now WordPress have stopped me with a fairly recent update. Now I have to do the writing on my proper XP machine with a proper keyboard but do the post setup and insertion of photos from the Windows 10 machine which is a pain.
My garage, however, is sacred! It’s for my oldest car and the parts for that and my old motorbike.
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Isn’t it nice to have a dedicated space to play around in. I couldn’t live without mine. My MacBook is 12 yrs old and all the programs work really well except when I try to work online in WordPress, which is why I use my iPad to post my blog after I write it on the MacBook plugged into a large screen and full keyboard. It is a little painful but I am not ready to fork over the bucks for a new computer.
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my old laptop is a real workhorse and, apart from taking ages to boot up, seems much quicker than the new machine. It doesn’t put out really aggravating messages all over the screen all the time either (probably because nothing’s updating any more!). It can also scan my photos, convert my vinyl and cassette music to digital, and play CDs/DVDs – none of which my new Windows 10 machine is able to do! So even when I stop using it online (which I suppose I really shouldn’t), it will still be kept on to do all the real work! 😉
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That’s why I will keep my old MacBook until it finally dies. It does so much with software I won’t be able to get on a new one.
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Yep exactly! Yet the so-called ‘experts’ keep feeding us new stuff which they say is much better but is actually much worse!
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We have a Messy Room here at Bonnywood, which is the former garage we converted into living space many years ago. (We have a carport and storage buildings at the back of the property, so the garage wasn’t really needed, as such.) When said room is tidied up and in order, it’s actually quite nice, designed to be an “entertainment room” in the style of a 1930s-ish gentlemen’s club. But it’s rarely tidied up. This is where we dump everything that currently doesn’t have a proper place in the rest of the house, and the degree of dumping fluctuates wildly.
Interestingly enough, this is also where I do my scribbling. I’ve staked out one corner of the room, wherein I have a small writing desk. (We have an actual office elsewhere, with workspaces for both of us, but Partner uses that one; once I retired, I only use that desk to pay bills.) The clutter does get on my nerves, at times, but I also sort of like it. It reminds me of my blog stories. Little bits of this and that, and you never know what you might run across…
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I sort of like/love my messy room too. It actually reflects more of my personality and holds a lot of memories.
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I’m afraid I’m too anal to let any room to get messy. That being said, do not look in my closets! My poor husband had to build a giant 2 story barn to hold his crap, I mean treasure.
😉
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Ha ha. I love my messy rooms. They keep the rest of my house looking really neat.
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That’s why they invented closets…
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