I had great plans to have a nice guest room, but in 3 years I have yet to re-do one piece of furniture for it. Maybe that needs to be my summer goal, get some of the furniture projects completed. I have:

2 patio chairs
2 barstools
a bed
a dresser
a vanity
and a side table

all that need stripping and re-painting, or at least sanding and re-painting.

My apartment is a studio, so I have zero bedrooms. Or 0.5? I have taken to referring to the combined living room/bedroom space as the "alpha quadrant."

David, wasn't there another B&B that was on the Haight but sort of on the way to the Toronado?

There was a beautifully restored Victorian B&B going that way, but I don't think it's in business anymore. I think I probably pointed it out to you.

We have three bedrooms: one for us, one for Rose, and a guest bedroom/office/nonfiction wing. None of the rooms are huge, but they fit everything we need them to. I think we'd be OK with another kid in this house, but if we have two more I think that would be tough. I don't mind the thought of my kids sharing bedrooms, but we also need space for a desk for M (who works from home a lot) at the very least, plus we would have to seriously rethink how/where we keep our books.

I would love to have 4 bedrooms - one for us, one for each kid, and one guest room / rec room. Right now we have 2 which is fine for a 6 and 2.5 year-old, but at some point I'm going to have a teenage boy who won't want to share a room with his baby sister anymore.

I have done jack with the spare bedroom since K-Bug moved out. It has a couch, a dresser, my craft storage, and a bunch of blankets. I think that is about it. I don't want to buy anything more until I know if we are moving next year.

In foot news, I have a referral for an x-ray. I'm waiting until after lunch to go to the imaging place. I want it to be nothing, but if it is nothing, why does it still hurt. And if it is something, what can really be done? One step at a time, Suz. Get the x-ray and chill out.

Insert standard statement on head-exploding-low housing prices in Gud's area.

The differences are amazing, but they aren’t arbitrary.

My house was designed by an iconoclastic female modernist architect in the 1950’s. It was featured in House and Garden magazine in the 1960’s and is still occasionally mentioned in architecture journals, mostly because of the unusual (for the time)feminist angle. It sits on a two acre lot that backs up to a 1400 acre nature preserve including the lake that was the original source of water for the city. And it is a 10 minute bike ride from my office in the center of campus. If this house were available in the places that academics actually want to live (e.g. Boston, Seattle, the Bay area) the price would be astronomical.

Wait, is Rick bragging about his multi-million dollar house? Nah, I don't live in any of those places. I live in a small university town in the Midwest. We paid $200,000 for the house, and we probably overpaid impulsively because we are both modern architecture fans. That’s a modest condo in one of the academic paradises.

We have no ocean. No mountains. It’s a four hour drive to get to a first-class museum. If you want to go to the theater, you better like what is available, because you only get one choice each weekend. And be prepared to eat at every decent restaurant 50 times, because there is such a limited supply of good resturants. It’s cold in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer.

Everything is a trade-off.

We have one bedroom, an office and Another Room, which is the guitar/amp/workout/inflatable bed guestroom. You have to walk through it to get to the office, so it's not an ideal bedroom. It's a small room, but we really rarely use it, which seems like a waste. I really want another bathroom, since we only have one (plus a half bath outside) but that is very unlikely unless someone suddenly gives us a big pile of money.

Hey. Rick, was your house designed by Chloethiel Woodward Smith, by any chance? She designed the modern house I grew up in.

We have three bedrooms --our bedroom, Bob's office, & the Middle Room. The Middle Room is our closet and library room and where I put makeup on. It's a mess and needs to be redone when we redo the bathroom which won't happen this year due to having to buy two cars.