Center Square

I've had a request to provide some more photos of the house. Here is a photo of what S and I call center square.

This big area is right smack in the middle of our house. If you look closely at the photo, you can see that it is actually open to the top of the house. Our landlord told us that he initially thought about leaving this completely open...all I can say is that would have been a nightmare during heavy monsoon season (he did leave the bathrooms completely open...yep that's right, rain and every critter I can think of could come in...we made sure that he covered those up before we took possession of the house). Luckily, he decided to put plexiglass over the opening. We have a lot of natural light in the house, and during the day, I don't have to turn any lights on. Now this may not seem like a big deal...but let me tell you, a lot of the houses I looked at here had a dark and deary feel to them due to very small windows.

Also if you look at the photo closely, you can sort of see that the center portion is sunken. My first thought about this was...remind me to be careful if I come stumbling home drunk some night...don't want to fall and break my ankle. Well, so far haven't been drunk...liquor isn't the easiest thing to come by in Chennai.

Anyway, this center square...although being very nice and decorative...is a big waste of space. What do we put here or do with the space??? The week we had our house guest, we had long conversations about what to do with this space. The best ideas included to set up a giant chess board. However, since S and I don't play chess, we ruled that out. We also had the thought of filling the sunken portion with water and putting piranhas in it. However, then we thought some of our friends may bring their kids over and someone would lose a finger...so we've nixed that idea. In one of the stores here, I saw a 18,000 piece puzzle...now this space would probably be big enough to put it together...but then I figured I would get frustrated with the puzzle before I even got all of the pieces flipped to the correct side, so I don't think this is the winning idea either.

The only thing we have really used this space for so far is when our sea shipment arrived...we just had the movers stack all of our boxes here.

Right now, the center square is vacant. When S is on a telephone call, he wonders around the center square. Also, he likes to go around saying "circle takes the square" (Hollywood Squares reference for those of you who don't watch game shows). I guess if we ever decide to have a large party at our house, we won't have to worry about having enough room to fit everyone. The one thing for sure that we are going to do with center square is put our Christmas tree here. However, I have a feeling that our 6 foot artificial tree will look a little dwarfed in this large space. We could easily fit a 20 ft tree here.

After Christmas though, center square will just be empty again. Oh well, at least we have something to always think about...what to do with center square?