A place of my own

When I was 9, I had a hideout. It was under the stairs in the garage downstairs – a place no one came because no one had any reason to. It was cold and concrete and entirely mine. Tragically, my parents converted that hideaway to a bedroom for my sister (some tripe about her not wanting to live in a drafty room entirely made up of windows). I’ve had many “places of my own” through life. There was the concrete bunker by the river. The abandoned tree house. The best of them was my dorm room in college. Since I married straight out of college, that was the only time in my life I’ve been the single occupant of my residence.

Now I own a house. It’s a nice house, with 4 bedrooms and practically all new appliances. (Latest update – the battery in our car died while we were pumping gas yesterday. I’m debating whether that counts or not.) You would think that this house I own is really “a space of my own” from basement to attic. I mean, I bought the couch. I organized the glassware. I water the plants. It should be the ultimate fulfillment of that impulse, right?

After putting our attic renovation plans on hold (due to being twice as expensive as I reckoned + needing a new furnace), we had to reconstruct our living space up there. The attic as it is has four spaces: a landing, a completely unheated bedroom (no closet, so just a bonus room) with the best view in the house, a partially climate controlled room with a sink (I know – weird) and an unfinished storage area with particularly lethal looking nails.

In our previous iteration, the small room was our guest room (or Chez Gospel when he was living here). The bigger partially heated room was our office. This came from a period in time, now lost to the fog of history, when computers were stationary and couldn’t be moved around easily. I know this sounds crazy now, but you needed a room where you could leave them set up all the time, and they took a significant amount of space. So when we moved in, we prioritized that space (which we’d used constantly in our prior house) and deprioritized the guest space. In her October visit, my mother in law had… ideas on how this could be improved upon.

So I decided to make the larger/warmer room with the sink our guest bedroom, and turn the (coldly) beautiful room with the view into an office. Since we do still intend to eventually do the attic project, one doesn’t want to buy much in order to do this. For the guest bedroom, we will need a new bed, my brother having taken his with him. But the office had everything I needed.

Over the course of a day or so, I put it together. And it scratched an itch that I’d had so long, I hadn’t even realized it was an itch. It was like taking off boots I’d worn for a long hike. It felt… amazing to have my own room again. And although my family is welcome there and Adam also works there, it feels very much like my own secret spot. It’s made me unreasonably happier than it should.

What about you? Do you have a place that is just yours? Is it something you long for?