I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it does.
Why won’t people use their front doors? Last week I stayed with some friends and during the entire weekend we were not permitted to use the front doors. We had to go in and out through the garage. I’ve noticed that many people instill this rule and it makes me nuts.
Instead of opening the door and walking out we had to go through “the tunnels” as I began to refer to them. A roundabout ass-backwards route to the driveway. What the hell is so special about your front door that you can’t open it to general use?
I’ve also noticed that the same people who won’t use the front door also have “the museum room.” The “museum room” is one room in the house, usually a big room, that no one s allowed to go in. Years ago people called them formal living rooms. Old people insist on covering all the furniture in the museum room with plastic.
Regardless, a shitload of people still have a museum room that people are forbidden to enter. I guess they figure if no one ever walks on the carpet it will last forever, like a shrine. Museum rooms usually have at least one white couch. I think that’s in the handbook somewhere. Anyway, people spend a lot of money for a house and then they cordon off the biggest and best room and declare it off limits. I can only assume what’s in their heads, that maybe someday, maybe, someone important enough will visit and they will enter the museum room and sit very carefully on the furniture for a little while. I don’t know who will qualify, but I’m pretty sure it would have to be a royal, or at least a Baron or a Viscount.
It’s been my experience that no family members will ever qualify to enter the museum room. And since the Queen Mother will probably not be visiting the Detroit suburbs or wherever any time soon, the whole thing is moronic. Three hundred square feet of house is roped off like a police crime seen; completely unusable. I have seen people live in a house for twenty years and never use that room.
In addition, the people who do this don’t have fifteen dollar per square foot wool carpet, priceless oriental rugs or even decent furniture. All I ever see is the standard, middle-class fare, including a shitload of small, inexpensive knick-knacks. Usually white ceramic pieces that are terribly old-fashioned. Maybe some cut glass—certainly not Venetian.
I have also noticed that if the family has a dog, he has been beaten into submission and will never enter the museum room except to shit on the carpet, because that’s the logical place, it will not be found for while.
So. Go ahead people. Keep roping off a big room that your family could use on a daily basis. Keep it reserved for the occasional poodle turd. Because you never know when someone better than you might drop by for a cup of Earl Grey.
I hate the museum room! In my apartment there are no white couches (they're black). My younger sister who lives in Georgia has that rule, passed down from my mother. Whenever I visited I'd spend most of my time there reading and writing, which irritated her to no end.
Actually, it was the best room for me to be in. Her snarky husband and unruly children never entered it and it was the only room in the house without a tv and stereo, so it was safe to talk at normal levels rather than shouting over the tv.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that feels that way.
btw, do you know the Kraft Corporation is opening a huge factory in Israel? Guess what they're going to call it?
Yeah, my grandma had a museum room. It was the room where the photo albums and tchochkes were stored.
We lived in the sticks, so although the front door was situated in that room, it really led out to nowhere. Nobody (but solicitious Jehovah's Witnesses) ever parked forward of the hydrangea bush. Everyone else knew to pull into the back yard. The garage was on the other side of the house, so we had no excuse not to use the back door.
As soon as I moved out, though, I was sure to use that front room for every nap I could possibly take when visiting. See, I'm a chronic couch-drooler.
The museum room annoys me as much as the dining room, especially when that same family already has a full sized table in their kitchen where everyone eats.
In messy households the dining room turns into the dumping room, where people dump all their stuff and then go and do other things. The table usually gets piles of cloth for clothes someone will never sew, odd-matched gloves, textbooks and the odd basket of clothes no-one has used in 2 years.