I was reading through the blogs and went to Joe's blog. He had 5 questions for Friday that I thought were interesting.

1. What is your most prized material possession?

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?

3. Are you a packrat?

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?

I liked question 2 because it made me think. And I looked up from the computer and there was a painting of a little Dutch girl that my aunt painted for me when I was little, at the most 6. It is hanging right over the computer and I love that painting. It's probably what I have at my house that I have owned the longest.

I also liked question 5. The rooms in my house do have a theme. My youngest son's room is Medieval. The Media room is Greco-Roman. The living room is Depression glass and antique china cabinets and side boards. The dining room is a library. The kitchen is all in blues. The bedroom is decorated to match the two paintings in there by Treby.

I thought it was pretty funny that my living room decorations are for a dining room/kitchen and that my dining room is a library. I hadn't ever thought about just how weird that was.

When we moved into this house, we came from a house that was half its size. We had empty rooms all over the place because we didn't own enough furniture to fill it up. Then over the last three years as my parents have been transitioning into retirement, my folks gave us my great grandmother's dining room set and my grandmother's bedroom set and two antique desks and a couch and a chair and an antique sideboard.

At first, the breakfast room had our table and chairs in it. The dining room was wall to wall bookshelves. Both my husband and I had always wanted a library and we could have one. We love that! Then my mom gave us grama's stuff. Well, the china cabinet couldn't go in the breakfast room, because there wasn't any wall big enough for it. And it couldn't go in the dining room because those were covered with bookshelves. So, it went into the living room.

When we got the couch and chair, we mixed and matched with our older furniture (which were hand me downs from my sister) and had the living room with two couches and I put the chair and the love seat in the library. I liked that. But one day I came home from work to find that the chair and love seat were in the breakfast room and the table and chairs were in the library. That was kind of cozy. It means my husband comes home from work and parks in the breakfast room and talks to me while I finish dinner.

It just kept going from there. Now we have too MUCH furniture in our house, except for bookshelves. We need about three more bookshelves right now. I am hoping to get those for my birthday next week. If I do, two will go in our room and one will go in the media room. (The library is already full.)