This used to be an attached garage, and I remember the fight my parents had about putting a temporary above ground pool in. My mother finally decided that "the women" could handle it, and bought and put the pool together while my dad was out of town.
For the last sixteen years, it has been a family room with green carpet, a glass insert door that has never been without the manufacture's plastic wrapper, and an unfinished atmosphere. In the winter, I loved that the register that had been added to the room was just an open hole in the wall. In the morning, I would stick my socks and gloves in the hole and come back after breakfast to toasty clothes.
A few years ago, they added an above ground hot tub that is usually just another horizontal surface for things to collect. In this photo, taken about six months ago, you can see a lot of the hot tub cover. When they moved the hot tub in, they tore some of the carpet out and put down a roll of wood-looking linoleum. The covered this with black rubber mats and put the hot tub on top of that. With such precautions to protect a concrete floor, and a still-unwrapped door, it's hard to understand why this doesn't include the spill of hot tub solution on the rubber mat, or the plastic gallon jugs on the floor, or the fish tank that's been empty for five years, or the fact that there isn't a horizontal surface left uncovered.
This room has the TV, access to the back yard, and the most natural light. It's often the room of choice when my sister and I visit. I find it a little ironic that there are two vacuum cleaners in a single room.
This room is very separate from the rest of the house. It's easy for one person to go into the family room, and another to go in the opposite direction. There's potential to never run into someone else in the house. A lot of the time, either my dad is in the family room and my mom is in the kitchen, or my mom is in the family room and my dad is in his office room.
Heh..."family" room.
did the hot tub ever get used? My parents buy so much stuff that never gets used. Like my mom's $5,000 computer back in the early '80s....
ReplyDeleteThey bought the hot tub after my mother's accident several years ago. The got it with insurance money and a prescription because she did hydrotherapy at the hospital for a while. Now, 95% of the time it's a horizontal surface that stinks up the house with chlorine. The other 5% of the time my dad uses it during football season. Now, to sell the house, they're going to either have to leave the hot tub to make the weird flooring scheme worth it, or they'll have to redo the floor.
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