Writing Exercise: A Room in the House

This writing exercise asks the writer to choose a room in the house and write a story about it. Here's what I wrote in the time allotted.


We have the most unusual bedroom in the United Kingdom. At least I think it's unusual from my limited experience.

The most un-British feature is the closets, or cupboards as I believe they are referred to here. The fact that we have closets is fairly odd. A typical bedroom has none, it's just a bare room before the furniture is put in. We have a whole wall of chestnut-paneled closets to hang our clothes in. A set of drawers was also built in, so our dressers wound up in other rooms for others to use. It's a happy problem to have.

A desk is built into the little bay window. Its drawers have also been filled with clothes, and I fear it sees very little duty as a desk. Mostly it serves as a drying rack for our clothes after the children's bath time.

The window does have nice brown curtains. Unfortunately the curtain rod is curved which matches the window nicely but the draw string never works nicely. Daylight makes only a muffled appearance in our room.

Another unusual feature is the access to the attic (British "loft") in our ceiling. Right over the door into the room is a panel with a drop down ladder. The access is almost too easy. Fortunately the children haven't discovered it yet, or they'd want to go exploring all the time. It makes such a nice hiding spot for presents.

The en-suite bathroom has a "drying cupboard" which I suppose is not unusual for England but is unusual to us. We'd rather have a regular linen closet with plenty of solid shelves to store towels, etc. The shelves in here are slats of wood with a good two inches of room between. And there's a radiator in there as well, we suppose to dry out things. Maybe the post-bath time clothes should go in there.

The bathroom also has plenty of cabinets for storage, more than we can reasonably use. We can now stockpile some necessities and have a sink that is only covered with toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes, not every last bottle of every last medicine, cosmetic, or cleaning supply that is usually found in a bathroom.


Time ran out here. While I did find a thematic element to tie things together, I didn't really find a story in the room. So it wasn't too successful, but I am happy enough with the results.