Naming Rooms

December 26th, 2019
house
Growing up, the bedrooms in the house had clear names: Jeff's room, Rose's room, Alice's room, Rick and Suzie's room, the au pair room, and the guest room. But people have moved around a lot: later occupants of "my" room have included Rose, Stevie, then later me, Julia, and Lily, and then even later Alice, Alex, and their children. Other rooms had a similar range of people rotating through ("the Wyman St home for itinerant folk-dancing youth") and referring to rooms became really difficult.

Around this time last year we decided to give names to the rooms: England, Scotland, Wales, and Italy. We painted the flags on the doors:

I was initially worried that the names wouldn't stick, and we'd be stuck talking about "Alice's—no—Rose's—no—Stevie and Val's old room", but now that's just "Scotland". Some of the names get used more than others—Rick's room is just called Rick's room—but having an unambiguous option for each room is super useful.

Possibly we should preemptively do something similar with our house, but we're probably ~15y off from this sort of room rotation and for now occupant-based naming is clearer.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Raffles

I think that raffles are kind of silly, because when you enter a raffle and you don't know what you're going to get, or if you're going to get anything, what's the point? If you pay for your raffle ticket, and you could pay the same amount…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

Air Filters in Schools

My dad went to a conference recently, and when I asked him about what happened there he said it was a conference for people in biosecurity. When I asked him about the different kinds of biosecurity stuff that the different groups did, he said one did air f…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts September 12, 2026

The One That I Want Another Sister

I want a baby sister or brother. Because I want to play with another kid, and I don't want to play with Josie because she is in preschool and I won't play with her very often. So I want to play with someone very often who is not just two people. …

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts September 5, 2026

more     (via openring)