Does anyone else have a redundant room, or, even better, had one but now uses it?

[thinkingmakesitso]

Sorry for the mouthful of a title!

Our playroom is really just a glorified store-room and it pisses me off how we never spend any time in there. It is a lovely room and gets a lot of sun, has doors onto the garden but at an angle rather than straight onto lawn, so you get a side view, another nice big window, some original features, nicely decorated etc etc yet we never sit there.

It does have a lot of toys (I am considering a cull ) but also a piano (the one time I go in there is to supervise practise) and a nice chair. I don't want the dc to play in there necessarily, I just want someone to use it!

Has anyone else got a similar issue? I think it's because I sit in the kitchen while pottering or the sitting-room for comfort/screen and there's no need for a third option. But what a waste .

[thenewaveragebear1983]

We have a garden room that's connected to our garage, which faces our house across the back garden. Optimistically called the 'games room', we have planned a gym, a kids den, among other uses. Currently houses all furniture/ kids toys/ half finished projects, plastic boxes of crap really useful things we definitely need to keep but would have thrown away years ago if we didn't have this place to keep them. I am virtually convinced that we will only do something good with this room when we decide to move and want to make it look like we use it and then the new owners can fill it with all their crap. Such a waste.... I often scour the storage-porn (ikea) catalogue and fantasise about having a whole wall of amazing innovative storage in there so that i Can just minimalise our house....

[PettsWoodParadise]

We have a dining room that also has the piano in. We only use it as a dining room about three times a year. I like that it isn't always used. It is the door I can close a project on. I also call it my sewing room. I have the space to cut out DD's costumes etc and loved making an Elizabethan costume for Tudor day, curtains for a bedroom etc, but if I had to clear away every evening I would find it hard to go back and lay it all out. We also used it as a downstairs bedroom when money was tight and DH wasn't working so although the room has no fixed purpose I have a soft spot for it as it always delivers on providing us the function we need at the time we need it. DD, a huge Harry Potter fan, calls it our 'room of requirement' . Why does a room have to have a fixed function?

[caroldecker]

Move to a smaller house

[WhatsGoingOnEh]

I'd love a "spare" room! I wirk from home, so I'd use it as my office during the say, but have a sofa and a TV in there so the men can play Xbox in the evenings.

I'd have bespoke wall-to-wall shelving, with books, photos and objects d'art on them (not that I have any, but I'd buy some if I had a room), and a desk facing the window. I'd have a chair with a fluffy sheepskin seat, and a beautiful painting, and all my creative projects proudly displayed.

OR... I'd have a shit-tip of a dumping ground with tonnes of laundry in it. Most likely, given my track record..

[MinesAPintOfTea]

I have my "library"

It has a sofa bed for reading and guests, walls lined with bookshelves and an easily collapsed table that I can sew etc on.

Its ds's prefered napping spot and where I go rather than the lounge when the house is asleep.

[mandy214]

We had a dining room in the last house but had a table in kitchen so apart from the occasional use when friends & family came to dinner, it was usually used as a dumping ground for piles of clean washing. Knocked through into kitchen and loved it. Have done the same in this house. Don't have enough space now we have children to allow any of it to be under used!!

[Millymollymama]

Get built in cupboards for the toys you keep. Out of sight they won't mess the room up so it looks like a dumping ground. Get bookcases for anything you want on display. Have a music system in there (DH's listening zone in our house), a comfy settee and a coffee table. A TV with sound connected to the speakers and keep the piano. Enjoy the garden with good garden furniture. Basically an entertainment room.

[Millymollymama]

I meant to add, we have no TV in our lounge. We have loads of seating and a big table - it is our chatting room!

[nooka]

We had a room like this in our house for ages. Nice room with a view to the garden (french doors onto the deck). Slightly surprisingly used to be the master bedroom, but was a dining room when we moved in.

We'd planned for ages to knock it through to the kitchen but got a really high estimate and so had to rethink. So now it's our main sitting room, and our sitting room has become our dining room/study. Works much better, the sitting room is more of a snug, and has really good acoustics for the TV, and we get a great view from our dining room table (plus enough room for lots of books!).

We mostly eat in the kitchen, but it's great to have a big table for the kids homework, puzzles and meals when we have extras (mainly dd's friends as me and dh are anti social buggers really!)

[Wishful80smontage]

We have a garden room which was meant to be a playroom/tv room for oh to watch sports (he will literally watch any football match going) its turned into neither just a storage room I don't like sitting in there with dd feels better to have her toys and play dates in living room and oh doesn't like sitting in there either so it really doesn't get used very often. I'm thinking of setting up a desk and computer in there.

[thinkingmakesitso]

Well, inspired by this thread I have just ordered myself a record player from Amazon so I can get my old records out again and set them all up in the offending room. I am very excited and don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. STBEX had told me record players were 'extinct' and the records needed to be transferred onto computers, which was A. Very. Complicated. Process. Turns out it's not the case .