This is my childhood home. Or, what’s left of it. My dad is knocking it down to build a new, sturdier house.
He bought the house in 1980, when I was six. We moved in just before I started first grade, and we still had time left in the summer to enjoy the 20×40 ft inground pool in the backyard, with its slide and diving board providing hours of fun.
I was excited because not only was this house a lot bigger than the old house, it had stairs, and my room was upstairs. The yard was huge, over an acre, with lots of trees, bushes, and even some hills for sledding. I spent a lot of time up in the trees, and we, along with the neighbor kids, built a treehouse in a tree by the pool. It was a fun yard to play in.
There’s a garage, and it’s pretty neat because there are 2 levels. There’s the upper driveway and upper garage, which is seen in the photo, and to the right of that, a concrete cliff and a grassy area separate a lower driveway, which leads to the lower garage. My dad plows snow off the cliff, and my sister and I used to make the best snow forts there – when we weren’t just jumping off it.
When we moved in, every room was wallpapered. This paper was in my bedroom:
I was pretty excited when I came across that online – it brought back tons of memories! I remember using my finger to trace a path across the hills that never seemed to end. There was also a bright pink carpet in my room. Not sure why I picked that room, considering how I feel about pink.
Eventually my dad and stepmom started putting their own touches on the house. They knocked down the walls between the dining room and back porch, creating one big room at the front of the house. Before the big remodel, Kathy drew on the walls to make it interesting. We had a fireplace and built-in bookshelves for awhile – all drawn, of course.
When I was in middle school, my sister and I moved into the cellar for the big remodel. The cellar was a bit creepy, with low pipes and no headroom, and lots of cobwebs. We used to joke the the cobwebs were holding up the house. During the remodel, walls came down, beams went up to support what the walls used to, the lathe and plaster came down and new drywall went up. New flooring throughout the house, and a new bathroom was built upstairs in what used to be a storage closet/playroom. That gave the house 2 full baths, in addition to the ancient half bath in the cellar that had cobwebs everywhere.
The house was built in 1925, and whoever built it left out a major piece: the central support beam in the cellar. By the time we got it, the house was sagging a bit, and continued to sag as time went on. It’s really a good thing that Dad’s building a new one, because no one wants to worry about weight limits in their house or panic if someone jumps.
It will be weird next time I go to visit. The house I grew up in, that’s been Home for 30 years, is gone, The yard is the same, except for the trees in the front yard that had to come down to make room for the bulldozer. But the house will be different. I won’t know where the bathroom is, or a cup so I can get myself some water. It’s going to be different.
But it will be good too. It will still be home.
Brought your niece, Messy J, by the old house on Sunday afternoon. Only then it was a pile of rubble with a small American flag sticking out of the top. Your own “ground zero” I suppose. Which it could well have been someday without that support beam! You’ll like the full frontal farmers porch when it’s all done!
@mommy, I like the American flag in the rubble – nice touch! I hope Kathy got pictures of that.
Dad showed me the plans last year when I was home. The new house is going to be really nice.
I love the memories you have of your home – they’re exactly the things a kid remembers. I remember loving the ideas of having stairs INSIDE a house, and doing things like playing with the patterns/paths on wallpaper. :)
@candice, It’s funny how attached we get to our childhood homes. Little things like what I wrote about are the things that make it special.
The house where I grew up is very different too. We sold it when I was in my 20′s. It is still weird to drive down that street and see it now. The people who bought it were going to do all kinds of renovations but instead they dug up our landscaped yard and left it that way. They painted the house brown and started parking cars on the front lawn. It’s sad to see it now.
@Laura, that is really sad!