I appreciate rooms. I am always in awe of and distracted by any room with any kind of character whatsoever. Currently, I rent an apartment. But someday I'd like to become a homeowner, and when I do, odd rooms will definitely be a selling point for me.

Speaking of my apartment, I've written before about the Redroom, and the many incarnations that preceded it. It's a handsome room. But many, many other rooms have caught my eye in the past, for just as many reasons.

If I were reclining on a psychiatrist's couch, I would say that my love of rooms dates back to a dream I had when I was about six years old. In it, I very realistically got out of bed and walked out into the hallway outside my bedroom. And there, low on the wall, was something I had never seen before: a little door. Suddenly I understood that behind this little door was a little hallway -- a hallway that led to a secret room all my own. I opened the door in the dream and instantly I snapped awake. I jumped out of bed and ran to the wall where to door was in my dream, but sadly, it wasn't there in real life.

The resulting disappointment lasted for weeks. I think this was the first time I realized the discrepancy between the awesome world of my imagination and the mundane world of reality.

A few years later my sister moved into a house in Superior, and her son (who was not that much younger than me) had a room that actually had a little door in the back wall, much like the one in my dream. Behind this little kid-sized door was an enormous playroom with all of his toys. The room itself was kind of gross, since there were no windows and it kind of smelled like rancid peanut butter sandwiches, but it was still the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

In high school I knew a girl whose family moved into a new house, and she also had a small room adjacent to her bedroom. She dubbed it the Voot-Voot Room, since "voot-voot" was a slang term for sex, used by teenagers in West Duluth in the late 80s. I don't think I ever actually saw her Voot-Voot Room, but she and other people, including myself, talked about it all the time. We thought it was fantastic.

In addition to the Redroom, the place where I live now has other weird rooms, or at least nooks and crannies. There's one weird closet that you have to climb three steps to get to. One of the walls is only a half-wall, peering into a normal closet immediately next to it. Right after I moved in, of course, I started referring to that closet as the Voot-Voot Room, even though it would be a pretty uncomfortable place to engage in any voot-voot. I pledged that I would use it for something interesting. Nothing's come to mind.

When you get down to it, it's the very impracticality of these rooms that appeals to me. The landing at the top of my back steps, for example, drives me insane. Sure, the smart thing to do with it is use it to store brooms, mops, the ironing board, and other tall junk that won't fit anywhere else. But that's boring. I want to put a table out there, even though I would never sit at it. I want to dream up some ingenious use for boring or/unusable space.

Potential. That's what attracts me.