Room naming: strange challenge¶

Tags: house

Perhaps it is not something you think of before moving into another house, but… how do you name the rooms?

Case in point: we have something we sometimes call a gangkast, a “corridor closet” in our current house. Only, it is not in the corridor, but in the living room. I still don’t know how we ended up with this name. Most of the time I try to call it the “staircase closet” as it is inside the living room, but under the staircase. But it doesn’t quite stick.

In the old house, the front door opens into a corridor. The back door opens up into the living room. In the new house, the back door opens into the corridor. So that is, right, the corridor. But when I use that term, my wife asks me whether I mean the corridor or the portal. By portal (Dutch: halletje) I mean the 1x1 meter just behind the front door, leading into the living room.

Blimey! How hard! So I try to get some names that I picked to stick. Using them constantly and making sure I correct wrong usage.

Most rooms now have a proper name. All except one weird one and one that give a problem:

• I’ve got a room for my own for working in. Doing some administration. Storing my programming books and my church administration and stuff like that. Weird thing is that I still call it a “study room”. I’m not studying anymore! I don’t know, but I’m not going to fight that name :-)

• We’ve got two closets downstairs now. A closet in the corridor and one in the living room, under the stairs. Calling that latter one the “stairs closet” is weird as it is in the living room. “Closet under the stairs” seems the best one, if a little bit elaborate. And I think that the one in the corridor is actually best called “storage closet”. I’m calling it for its function instead of for its location. The reason: the “corridor closet” name was sometimes abused in our old home for the closet in the living room under the stairs… :-)

I might even go so far to put actual labels on the rooms… Although I’m probably going to far then…