Some of us have the luxury of having an extra room that we use for something special in our lives. It might even serve double duty as an emergency bedroom or dressing room, maybe even just as a big closet. If you happen to use it for no other purpose than for your own activity or hobby room then maybe you can really make it yours by theme the room after your special craft or hobby.
When we became empty nesters my wife and I had two spare rooms. We kept them as spare bedrooms for a long while after the chance of any offspring returning had passed. My wife redecorated the smaller of the two but kept it as an emergency bedroom and used it for overnight guests on a few occasions when friends had a crisis or relatives popped in unexpectedly and stayed the night.
I had been eyeballing the other room however for quite some time. Before I started to push the issue I kept asking my wife if she wanted a sewing room or reading room. She said we spent too much time apart lately since I would always run to my basement "ham" radio shack leaving her to fend for herself watching TV in the evenings. With that statement I found a way to "get my room" and bring us closer together.
I suggested that instead of me running off to the basement to play with my radio and electronic toys, I could convert the spare room into my ham radio room and then be just a short few doors down the hall instead of out through the garage and down into the basement which could seem like a long distance away just to yell at me for supper or whatever. With permission granted I cleaned out the room and stated to plan the layout. There were all sorts of "radio" considerations to make and those would take time and some expense. Instead I decided to first decorate and "theme" the room for my ham radio and electronics hobby. I could have decorated the walls with maps of the world showing all the places my ham radio set could talk to or line the walls with those QSL cards which are verification post cards of all the world wide conversations I had had over the years. Then it hit me. I had a pile of old radio and electronics magazines just full of electronic circuit diagrams called schematics. Road maps of the circuits inside the gadgets we hams used every day. Some creative cutting and pasting and about a week of a couple of hours per evening and voile! It was like standing inside a room sized electronics magazine.
My ham friends love it but the best part is that it has launched a neighborhood of spare room home improvement and redecorating projects. The bicycle fanatics next door have covered their half bath walls with a collage of black and white pictures of bicycles from the earliest turn of the century models to current titanium light weights. It looks great with their black and white tile, fixtures and curtains. Another neighbor has taken pictures from a New York Times book with front page pictures from the Times from the Vietnam War era and turned his "study" into a memorial. The ideas are endless and the wallpaper material is cheap!
| Price : $133.99 | Post Date : May 03, 2012 14:21:21
