Fishy

One of my favorite rooms in our house is the fish room. There is not a goldfish bowl in sight. We call it by that name because this tiny room houses our collection of art from around the world with fish as the subject matter.

I also love this room because it did not come with the house. The fish room is entirely recycled. After living in our self-designed home a short while, we decided that entering the house from the garage directly into the basement was not too ambient. We decided to build a small entrance hall, and my extremely handy husband created it out of bits and pieces of wallboard left over from the construction of our home’s other walls. No one would ever guess it’s a patchwork of pieces.

It’s hard not to come into the fish room and not smile. Fish are swimming from the ceiling, hanging from the walls and filling the shelves of a fifty year old teak bookcase.

There’s a great piece of irony here as well. When we built the fish room we had one cat who lived upstairs. But as the years have gone by, we’ve helped out our neighborhood’s homeless cats. The rest of the basement has become the rescue cats’ very classy two story (to a cat) apartment complete with an outdoor catio. So the fish room is now also a cat room.

One of our cats whose name is Shrimp has chosen the second shelf of the fish room’s bookcase as his own special spot. He even sleeps there, nestled into the fish.

The fish in the fish room had a real treat a few weeks ago: I flooded their room. I put two pillows in the washer in the room directly above them and turned the washer on the high setting. The washer overflowed spectacularly and caused a deluge down below testing my husband’s wallboard skills to the maximum. Now, after some hard work on his part, you would never know I had turned our fish room into an aquarium.

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