Living room - more formal

Florida room - family room with TV, that is open to the kitchen

lanai - covered area outside next to the pool

scary room - husband's office

Living room - the one I love to decorate and make beautiful, mostly used for company but I admire it every day because we pass through it to get to the bedroom and bathroom areas

TV room - comfortable but also decorated with paintings and Chinese porcelain, we not only watch TV but sit on the couch with our laptops because we belong to a lot of interesting forums

Office - I work from home, but also decorated like every other room, with a large couch and pretty rug, that's just me

Dining room - decorated and holds part of my porcelain collection, we only eat there when we have company. It's the TV room for when it's just the two of us plus the cat otherwise for all three meals (we are very classy people).

Entry room - it's a room with the guest bathroom off it, lots of porcelain and paintings, large Persian rug and love seat, tall secretary with books and porcelain, you get the idea by now

The Pink Room is, well, pink. When we bought the house, the wallpaper in it had some pink, and we put the pink sofa (it's actually kind of a dark neutral pink, if you can belive that) in there. I've since added a washed-ish red and white wool Frenchy rug and some other things. We really don't use the room for anything, it's between the kitchen and garage and dining room and porch, and if our kids were smaller it probably would have been a playroom. I keep wanting to make it "my" office, but when our router didn't reach that far it didn't make sense, and now I just find it too isolated. So, The Pink Room it is.

There is a tendency for some people around here to call a gathering room the French Room. I think it comes from Front Room, but some have told me no, it's just what their mother and grandmother called it.

Then there's my brother, who lives in a vintage condo. He has a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and studio-well-it's-really-a-dining-room-but-since-I-don't-need-a-dining-room-I-use-it-as-my-studio . . . this can lapse into a long discussion of whether it was, in fact, a dining room or what it's provenance it. I tell him, call it what you use it for, and that's what it is.

I should do the same with the Pink Room: give it a name and it will become more than a repository for my pink stuff.

The house I grew up in had The Porch. It was designed as a screened porch across the back of the house, but during construction it morphed into a three-season room, then a four-season air-conditioned and heated room. It ended up being a family room, but we always called it The Porch.

LOL, Pal.

This is a funny topic. My in-laws have a room they added on, sort of a rec room or TV room, about 40 years ago. They call it "the new room".

We had a screened porch until we had a party and a guest called it the "verandah", and a star was born.

In our house, we have a vestibule and then an "entry hall", because it runs from the front to the back of the house and so feels like more than a foyer. (ETA - I had "runs the length of the house", but its actually the depth of the house)

We have a "cloak room" which is different from our mudroom because it is off the more formal entrance rather than the everyday, side entrance. Friends with an old Victorian home had a cloak room, a small room lined with hooks and no door. We liked the idea so built one here; it is super nice for entertaining esp in cold climes.

We call a long hallway off the side entrance, which we call our "loading dock" because that is where we put luggage as we pack, boxes ready for UPS or inbound packages, stuff the kids need for school the next day, etc.

We have a room we call "the craft room", which is indeed filled with paints and markers and wrapping paper and ribbon and rubber stamps and beads and fabric scraps and pens and pencils and crayons and scissors etc etc. At this stage, with three in HS, it is more aptly the homework room but, for "internal marketing" purposes, we retain the cheerier name.

We added a conservatory off of our pool area. It was built by a British company and that is their term, but we call it a "greenhouse" (we chose a simple style to suit our casual home), though we do not grow plants in it.

We call the room we use as a living room, as opposed to the family room, "the octagon", due to its shape. Although the craft room is also an octagon, it was a later addition.

We have a small room off the (LR) octagon that has a half bath and a day bed. It is nice for guests who do not want to use the stairs to go to our guest bedroom. But we call it "the music room", because it is at one far end of the house and has a door, making it ideal for budding elementary school "musicians" who were directed to use it for clarinet, flute, and guitar practice. Blissfully soundproof.

Our main house is a large side by side split level. Here we have a Garden Room. I am the only one who uses this room. It is under the expanded master bedroom. It opens to the backyard. To get to it you have to pass through the laundry room.

At the rivehouse, we have a parlor which is the main room in the original part of the house built about 1935. It used to be surrounded by an open 4 sided porch which a previous owner enclosed as now bedrooms and a bathroom. It has a good river view.

Another room is the porch along the river side which we most often refer to as the Play Porch since this is where the grands store their toys and used to play. Now they hang out. . Toys are still here but the kids have outgrown most of them. This porch serves as a great sitting area with river view. When the grands are all here, it transforms into the kids' dorm.

There is a second porch that we call the screened porch. My neighbors have done a better job naming their porches than I. They have river porches and east porches, sunrise porches, sunset porches. I tried, but my family did not cooperate.

We have a living room that is not all that formal, as it has a TV and the front door, and so it is also the entryway. I've never had a mud room, and what might have been a coat closet in our house is a broom closet, which houses brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner, irons, and ironing board.

The kitchen is a more or less separate room, although previous owners removed the door to the living room, and so I am unable to close it off the way I would want to. It also has the washer & dryer, and so the back part of it doubles as a laundry room. I would really love to have a separate laundry room, but I have no desire for a mud room. The kitchen was expanded in size in the 1990s to include the laundry area and a new pantry. It doesn't have as many upper cabinets as I need, and so I hung a pot rack over the peninsula to create extra storage.

The dining area is not a single room, but I still call it a dining room, even though it is part of what we call the art studio, which has a huge drafting table, a skylight, and north facing exposure. The previous owners used it as a den and they had the living room more formal with a piano in it. They also cut two holes (like windows) in the wall between the living room and the dining area, but these may have been exterior windows originally. I did not like these cutouts at first, but I've gotten used to them, and they make the house seem more spacious when you walk in as they allow you to see through to the back patio door from the entrance. Also, you can watch TV from the dining table, but I don't necessarily like that. I would often rather have walls where I could hang art instead.

I have the master suite, since my brother got the second living room as his art studio, and the third bedroom we use as a guest room/exercise room/sewing room. We seldom have guests spend the night, and so we use an inflatable mattress when they do visit.

The garage is used for storage - not for parking a car - and we have an extra refrigerator and a stand-up freezer in there, as well as most of my brother's tools. When it rains, we store the patio chair cushions there.

Lol, mtnrdredux_gw! The loading dock. That is perfect. I think I would have fun in your home. I love that many of you have older homes with rooms that have history. And who would have thought there are two Pink Rooms out there!

I once saw and HGTV episode where the wife insisted on having a 'Keeping Room' - I had to look that one up.

We have a formal living room, a casual tv room with wood stove that we call the sitting room and then we have a "forgotten" room. It was meant to be a pantry but anything and everything gets shoved/stored in there. We started calling it the forgotten room right after we moved in 17 years ago and we still refer to it as the forgotten room!

Downstairs, we have

living room (where we watch TV and have a fireplace

dining room (where we eat company meals)

breakfast porch (an addition we made about 10 years ago -- a casual eating space)

kitchen

Upstairs we have:

bathroom (no explanation needed)

bedroom (our room)

sunroom (off our room and used as a second TV area and holds lots of our books for we have a wall of books)

spare room (our guest room)

Living room- we also call this the “front room”, since it’s next to the front door. This room is almost never used except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and large gatherings. We have a new teal sofa in this room that we call “Seymour’s couch” because my sons’s cat Seymour is the only one who ever uses it. So far no scratching, just sleeping!

Family room- open to the kitchen, it has a fireplace and TV. It’s where we spend most of our relaxing time, watching tv. reading, on our laptops/phones, etc. I take naps on the loveseat in the afternoon, and fall asleep to anything on tv after 9pm.

Dining room- next to the living room and accessible from the kitchen through swinging doors. Used 2-4 times a year. We eat in the kitchen, even when we have guests over.

office- it’s where my husband works. He chose the built-in cabinets, desk, sofa and paint. There are many guitars and audio equipment and multiple computer monitors. It’s the ugliest room in the house.

Playroom- Our youngest is 19 and away at school, so it’s been a long while since there were toys or playing in this room. It’s sort of a music room, with 6 guitars on the wall, a keyboard, banjos and other assorted instruments. There are also 2 computers and 4 monitors in there. The playroom door stays shut.

The backroom- also known as “Jonathan’s room” since it was his room as a child. It’s really a guest room now, as well as a craft/wrapping room. When I’m not in the middle of a project, this room is very pretty.

The loft- our daughter’s room used to be a loft, but we closed it off and made it into a bedroom when she was born. We still refer to it as the loft.

Powder room- our downstairs full bath. It has a claw foot tub, but no one uses it.

Garage- no car has ever been parked in here. The floor is covered with rubber interlocking mats and there is a treadmill, elliptical, and bench press, as well as a fridge/freezer. For many years it was cleared out and turned into a haunted house for Halloween, but we stopped two years ago.

The only weirdly-named room we have is...well...anyone else would call it a family room. It's part of an addition we did 12 years ago and includes the kitchen, is open to the kitchen. But it's never had a TV, or toys really, so we never got the hang of calling it the family room. The TV is in the living room, which is not formal. I would call our basement room -- which has the bigger TV, more seating, and toy and game storage -- the family room, but instead we all call it The Basement or Downstairs. For the room off the kitchen -- which has sofa, chairs, a desk and chair, etc. -- we use the quaint term "the room next to the kitchen." ;-)

LOL Sue

The downsize house I'm in now has areas. It's all open plan and I didn't realize till this post that I have started saying the living area and the dining area. In my last house there was the living room, the dining room, the game room and the exercise or workout room.

My guest rooms often get named after the last person who stayed the longest. I'm not sure we even do that consciously. We still call rooms with doors in this home a name that states the purpose, the art room , the bathroom etc..

When my parents built their house, they included a suite for a live-in housekeeper. For a few years we called it the maid's room. Well, we didn't hire a housekeeper, but my grandmother did come to live with us, so it became Grandma's room. When she passed away, it became the Blue room, because, duh, the carpet, bath tile, and bath wallpaper were blue.

My friend moved into a house where the terrace had previously been converted to a carport, then enclosed and the patio sliders removed to make it part of the house before they ever bought it. They forever called it The Addition, though it had become part of the house before they bought it.

Hey, does anyone call their Flex Room "the Flex Room"?

Mtn, you brought me back with the "cloak room". When I started elementary school, there was a long cloak room with the pegs separating the kindergarten and first grade rooms, and accessed by both. I suddenly remember getting lost - which room to go into?, and was frozen there until a teacher found me! Also, Rebecca, in the early 70's we had a builder change his standard plan from a kitchen with opening to a dining room, which had an opening to the LR. We had the LR wall solid, and the wall separating the kitchen and dining room eliminated creating a kitchen open to what we called the Keeping room.

My current house has a breezeway between the house proper and the garage. Even after replacing the jalousie doors and adding a mini split for heat and air to create my office, I still have not been consistently referring to it as such, as half the time it's still The Porch. Hopefully when I get the remaining jalousie windows replaced it will officially become my Office.

Since I have never yet used my back bedroom as my intended Studio nor Guest room, it has gradually become The Spare room.

I grew up in houses with unused formal living rooms, and somehow have managed to avoid that in my own homes. We’ve never really had many surplus rooms. We did have a sunroom at one house, and we called it. . . The sunroom. We’ve only had one 4 bedroom house, so in that one DH and I shared one room as the office, and the smallest bedroom was “the horn room,” where we kept all the musical instruments.

My grandparents had a little porch behind the living room fireplace. At some point they closed it in to make a little den, and it became “the por-den”. When I was little I thought that was a legit name for a room.

I have to steal a story from a former colleague. Her parents lived in a little country town on a few acres. At some point their big old Caprice gave out and they got another car. But they kept the Caprice, parked it under a tree, and used it to store the huge packs of paper towels, toilet paper, etc. from the big box stores. Hence it earned its new name: “the shed.” Every time a grandkid approached driving age, the family threatened to empty out “the shed” so he could have that fabulous car for his very own.

In the UK a cloakroom is a powder room- extremely confusing- I have no idea why- I double checked with Wikipedia before mentioning it here- because it seems so odd.

We have the “front room” which is our Living/Dining Area and the “green bathroom” which is the non- master bathroom. I don’t know why we don’t call it “the boys’ bathroom” but it is definitely very green so there’s no mistaking which bathroom soneone’s referring to.

I’m sure when the boys are grown and out of the house, their rooms will still be known by their names! At my husband’s childhood home, he and his siblings still call the rooms by ‘their’ name while my MIL has renamed them. But she is the only one who knows the rooms by those names, haha

The "cloak room" cracks me up! I went to Catholic school for twelve years; we only had a cloak room. Closet or coat room (as language for hanging coats) was never used.

I’m curious about the term ‘den’. We have what we call a den, because it’s my husband’s space mostly and that’s what he (from the Maryland D.C. suburbs) calls it. I (from eastern PA) would have called it an office. It has two walls of built-in cupboards/shelves, a TV, a small couch and a desk. I wonder if the meaning of ‘den’ has regional variations.

I have a small house. My living room is the room with couches, tv, coffee table, front door. I grew up calling that space a living room and couldn't call it anything else.

Other than bedrooms and bathrooms, my living space is a fat L, with the dining area in the corner between the living room and kitchen. I call it a "dining room" and it contains my table and chairs. Depending on the time of day, I call it my "dining table" (p.m.) or my "kitchen table" (a.m.). At this moment, I'm sitting at my kitchen table.

If I have a need to mention it (maybe by saying I repainted it or assigning rooms to overnight guests), the main guest room is still Carly's room. Carly lived here before I bought the house (20+ years ago), she was the only girl with 3-4 brothers, and was given the largest (non-master) bedroom. The room was overwhelming pink when we moved in. I guess the brothers were all stuffed into the other (painted white) bedrooms. Maybe she was oldest, and the only girl, and rank hath its privileges? It seemed so wasteful to me that she had all that space while others double or tripled up.

We knocked out a wall between the room FKA "the front room" and the kitchen. It's now just the kitchen. The downstairs office was turned into the laundry room. An upstairs bedroom became the office. The smallest bedroom is the little junk room. The room is little, the amount of junk, sadly, is not.

Maddielee, I grew up in Florida, and when I was a kid a Florida room was an enclosed porch with windows that could open, but no A/C. I never heard the term "lanai" until I grew up and met people who came to Florida from somewhere else. We called those "screen porches".

We have the cats' bathroom. :)

Donna

We have some things pretty normal. a living room. Master ensuite which I call a little hole in the wall. Guest bath room which has two sinks as if it were the master ensuite. I'm a little confused about that:-). I use the guest bath everyday so why is it the guest bath? I don't know that's the name of it.

We also have a enclosed porch used to feed the dogs, house my treadmill and is connected to the back porch and yard which I call the fake room because it is far too cold and uninsulated to actuall be used in the winter. It has a plastic see-through roof!

My teensy house has rooms mostly with usual names. The living room is kind of a misnomer since it is also the dining room at one end. Names for the bedrooms are problematic because when my older son moved out, my younger son moved into that room so it depends which one of them is home at the moment. My aunt’s house had a sun porch (enclosed) and above it was what looked like a regular bedroom but was always called the sleeping porch.

My son’s house had a dining room they never used so they kept stuff from their boat in there and it became known as the boat room.

I grew up in an area that was relatively isolated and insular probably til after the Bicentennial and there were people my age that still said parlor, ice box, cellar, and called a powder room the lavvy and had a " TV room " which was often what would have been the dining room or a closed in porch. Or the closed in porch served as a mudroom but was still called the porch. And if i watched soap operas I was "watching my stories".

And things were out by the front door or by the steps not in the entry or foyer or vestibule.

Pal, growing up "ice box" and "fridge" were often interchangeably used in my family, and I think even into the early years of my marriage. But Cellar? We still say cellar and basement all the time - never occurred to me that it's an out of date term.. We are talking unfinished spaces if it makes a difference.

My parents' summer house, which was an old traditional colonial had a "summer kitchen", which was not heated and was used at the turn of the century for cooking and preparing meals prior to air conditioning. I always thought it was odd, but have since found out it was common then. (The summer kitchen is a rectangular, one-to-two-story, usually gable-roofed structure that is closely related to the main house. Sometimes it is a wing, but usually it is semi-detached or completely detached.)

Our was a wing off the main kitchen, connecting the kitchen to a hallway that lead to the barn.

In our home we have a "sunroom" situated at the back of our house, which gets very little sun so we call it the "porch". It's a fully insulated, year-round room.