All I Really Need is a Place for My Stuff

I have a confession to make: our house is not something that Marie Kondo would say sparks joy.

When you put two pack rats* together with three kids, you're going to have piles of stuff to move around on a regular basis. While I'd like to look at my home as a place to relax and enjoy myself, when you get right down to it, I look at a home as a place for my stuff.

You knew I was going to put this here, didn't you?
This is one of the George Carlin routines that aged well.

I don't really have a sense of decoration, either. I've seen what some people call "decoration" and I think that I can't see the walls from all of the pictures on them. On the flip side, I'm not a big fan of the minimalist look, either. I just want a place for everything, and enough furniture and decoration that don't look like they came out of the 60s/70s/80s to make it work. Despite my best intentions, I simply can't get things decorated well. Not for a lack of trying, mind you, but I also have to balance my mom and my in-laws dumping decorations and whatnot on us that we really don't need with my own distaste of the items themselves. 

My own home was built in the mid-80s, and it shows. The two story and bi-level/split-level homes built in that era all have the same general look about them; they tend to be boxy, but they get maximum use out of minimal space. The oversized great rooms and specialty areas of the houses that were built afterward simply don't exist, so my home office is set where the dining room was originally designed to reside.**

So you know where this is going, right?

This is what my homes in video games tend to look like, if I'm left to my own devices:

It's a bit blocky, but it works.

Penny would occasionally complain about
all those chests around; I ought to do something
about that one of these days. Note that most
of the furniture there came with the house.

So yeah, I'm decoratively challenged and I look at houses as a place to put things, rather than to live in them. (It's a failing.)

MMO housing doesn't make me squeal with delight as it does some people. I mean, it's great to look at when it's done well, and believe me, I've seen plenty of people who have done it well --some even read the blog!-- but that seems to be beyond my capacity. I don't have any screencaps of the home I had in LOTRO, but the front of it looked like a stereotypical backwoods shack with all sorts of broken down material scattered around in front.

In other words, I think I would give Marie Kondo a heart attack.

***

So when I saw that this dropped in Retail WoW yesterday...

From an email dated 12/3/2025.

I realized that I was not the target audience. 

That's fine. I don't need to be the target of MMO salesmanship; after all, I'm not a big spender when it comes to DLC and whatnot. If anything, that translates in-game to me not really pursuing monetary or bling-centric goals.***

To those who are reveling in the chance to play around with housing, I wish you the best of luck. I'll be reading your blog posts!

*Yes, I'm calling myself out. I may not have as much stuff as my wife does, and I do throw things out more than she does, but there are plenty of things that I know I'll keep until I die. 

**We never formally entertained people, and we've never used the fine china that we were obligated to request in our wedding lists. In fact, all those plates and utensils and whatnot are still in storage in the basement, having never been used once. I think the only thing we ever did use were the wine glasses, and those are also now in storage since a) we have a lot of "free" glasses given to us from the local wine festival over the years, and b) I can't really drink alcohol much any more.

***Despite what some people may think, I count Epic Riding and Epic Flying as bling-centric. If it becomes a requirement to do something, I'm going to push even harder against it. But that's just me.