Bequeathing Titles

Sunday, 01 January 2012

Jennifer and I rang in the new year by finishing up our office slash playroom:

I know what you’re thinking – “office slash playroom” is a lousy name for part of the house, right? Yeah, we’re still working on that. The problem is, we have so many areas of the house, I don’t know what to call them all. For example, we have a deck AND a porch. Worse, we have this area by the circuit breakers (down in the basement) and I’m never sure how to describe that area. It’s kind of a utility room, but not really.

We also have three landings. We’ve only ever had one landing before: in our townhome. For those who don’t know, a ‘landing’ is aplace in a staircase where it flattens out for a bit – usually to turn a corner. In our townhome, we just called that spot “The Landing.” But in our new mansion, we have three of them. What to call them?

We named them (in descending order from highest elevation to lowest): The Kent, The Tudor, and the Windsor. This allows us to speak with greater precision, as in, “Owen, pick up your toys and set them on the Tudor so I can vacuum,” or, “Hey, the cat just threw up on the Windsor.”

Other things requiring better names are the two car stalls of our garage (the East and West Wing?), the three ‘spaces’ in our basement that are not the bathroom or the laundry room, and, of course, that pesky office slash playroom. I’m also pushing for a name for our entire estate, too, though the main issue with that seems to be that Jennifer and I can not agree on a suffix: Shall it be a Manor? A Dwelling? Just plain Home? A Castle? Or (my favorite) a Compound?

Clearly, we have our work cut out for us.