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.

That's really cool, Rick.

That's the kinda awesome thing about the whole building process...we do genuinely use every room in the house every day.

Every so often I think we overdid it and I wouldn't mind being in a smaller space, but it would need to be a well-designed smaller space.

My house. It loves carrots.

But yes, it is also a forty minute drive to the grocery store and a twenty minute drive to the gas station, so you'd better plan.

Hey. Rick, was your house designed by Chloethiel Woodward Smith, by any chance?

No. Our house was designed by Elaine Doenges, whose work is mostly limited to a variety of university towns as her husband moved from faculty position to faculty position. Smith is a much bigger name, I think, with important commercial and urban development work in addition to residential.

Very exciting to grow up in that house! Did you know that you should be excited at the time?

Congratulations, Gud! (Insert standard statement on head-exploding-low housing prices in Gud's area.)

So true. Also, that is wonderful Gud! A real sense of freedom must come with owning your home outright. Some day!

Our house (rental) is a 4/4 and also has an office. We use 3 of the bedrooms as such, and the 4th is a guest bedroom / game room. There is a desk and computer in there and a big screen tv with game machines attached. After we sell our house we will investigate buying this one since it has been in foreclosure a couple years. If we can work something out directly with the lender that would be good because the price would be too high if it went to market.

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.

Yes, it was one you pointed out while we were walking thataway with Law.

Ugh, for some reason I thought SF in August wouldn't be insanely expensive, but I was wrong. Think I'm gonna Priceline it.