Can you remember that far back? What did you love about it… what did you hate.
I really try to be good but it just isn’t in my nature!
Mine was tiny (used to be my mom’s sewing room before I surprised 'em), but I loved it. The wallpaper was golden yellow/white fine stripes; in the morning the sunshine would stream in and the entire room would be filled with a warm, bright glow. ::sigh:: I still miss it - what a wonderful way to wake up.
Jenny Lind style bed, the red chenille spread, grandma’s old vanity with three mirrors, and the little door that went into the attic – always had to keep something in front of that door!
And the old table model wooden radio, with tubes that glowed in the dark, almost as good as a night light.
Awful yellow paneling.
Bunkbeds. These were great. I shared the room with my younger brother until our older brother moved out.
I used to stay up watching TV (the den was next to my bedroom - weird house) through the slightly opened door. I think my eyesight sucks because of this.
Various posters - changing over time.
Building blanket forts.
Stuffed piled high on my desks (some things never change).
~handcrafted signatures since 1975~
My favorite room was when I was a preteen. I was finally! allowed to paint it the color of my choice. PURPLE YES! I went to the paint store and had them match the strip on my shoes 
I love purple. I also got the handme down loveseat which was great it gave me a nice place to daydream.
Keep smiling it makes 'em wonder what you’ve been up to.
Yellow linoleum (not vinyl, real linoleum) with multi-colored confetti design. Tan wall paper with cowboys, horses and stage coaches. Two twin beds, under one of which resides a hungry crocodile like in Peter Pan. A long window near the ceiling, through which I can see a large peach tree overhanging the roof; when the wind blows, the branches scratch the roof and make a creepy noise. Beyond the peach tree on a telephone pole is a large transformer with a dim red light, which I find very comforting in the darkness. Just outside my bedroom door is a heat register on the wall; on cold mornings, I take my clothes there and get dressed in the warm air. A small closet with lots of strange clothes that I don’t wear; below them, the floor is strewn with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs and a bright orange $500 bill from a Monopoly game. Picture books about dinosaurs and outer space. A shoe box with unused A tickets from Disneyland. A painted metal bank that looks like a treasure chest, filled with pennies and foreign coins. A worn pair of Red Ball Jets. A leather dog leash, marked by puppy teeth.
Wow. Thanks, PCW
TT
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber
My room was always the first pick after my parents picked theirs. Then my brother would get whatever was left.
Army brat: new room every 2-4 years. Usually lived in DND Housing (Department of National Defense). All the same and all in a row. YUCK. Or in whatever rental may parents had located. Another Yuck.
Well, my bedroom (which I occupied from the age of 4 through14) was rather nice. First, the dimensions, I’m not a carpenter, but I’ll stab in the dark and say it was somewhere around 15’ X 25’, with 2 large windows on either side, the door centered on one end and a closet to the left of that. Hardwood floor.
The furniture- Dark Cherry Antique bedroom set, twin-sized sleigh bed, 2 dressers, one tall, one long with 2 large mirrors above it, desk and chair, bench at the foot of the bed, small end table.
The color scheme was yellow and white. Yellow was my favorite color; my parents let me pick the wallpaper, bright sunny yellow with small white polka dots. Only the back wall was papered (behind the bed) and the rest of the room was painted white, with yellow bordering the windows and doors. I really wanted a canopy bed, but my parents had already purchased the aforementioned suite, so my father took a strip of the wallpaper and applied it directly over my bed on the ceiling, leaving about 6 inches hang down at the end, which was papered on the other side and cut into small triangles. My mother glued little yellow pompoms to the tips. I remember a few pictures of little girls with butterflies and stuff. On top of my dressers were Matchbox cars and Spiderman toys, lots of books and a big globe on my desk.
It changed a lot when I hit 14- I moved to another room, shared with my sister, and plastered the walls (my half-yes we taped the floor) with Duran Duran posters, Ramones poster, stickers and stuff.
I like it here-can I stay?
And do you have a vacancy for a Back-scrubber?
My room - which I shared with my sister - was most of what used to be the attic, so we had a ceiling which sloped down to meet the wall about 3 feet from the floor. White walls, grey painted wood floor, one dormer window that looked out into a huge tree. Oak or maple or somesuch, that was always full of buzzing cicadas. The trunk of that tree was the best place to find empty cicada shells, because they’d climb part way up it before shedding.
The door to the attic was in our room, and we always kept something in front of it. When my parents had to take things out of/put things into the attic (really just the unfinished part of what my sister and I were already living in) these bugs we called Assassin bugs (real name? dunno) would get into our room and we’d have to sleep downstairs that night because they were poisonous and my dad would have to kill 'em and we’d be afraid to sleep there.
The stairs came right up into the middle of the room and had thick sturdy white railings. I had one of those “real hair” Ken dolls. It wasn’t real hair (it was nylon) but it was real hair in the sense that it wasn’t painted-on like the regular Ken dolls. It was the 70s, so he had come packaged with some stick-on facial hair. A couple of beards, a couple of mustaches, and this mustache-beard combo which accidentally got stuck to the railing in our room. When my mom repainted our room she painted right over it. I wonder if there is still the ghostly outline of a Ken beard on that railing. We moved out of thathouse in 1980, and the new occupants would probably find it odd if I visited to check out the upstairs railing.
My room was the best when I was 5, before I was forced to share it with my little sister. I remember it vividly.
I had a cot-type bed that had wheels (which I thought was the coolest thing EVER,) and a back tin headboard, which was cool, because it stopped the money from the tooth fairy from falling off the bed.
I had a ton of stuffed animals, each with thier own specific personality. One of my favoite pictures of myself was when my father found me having a tea party with them and snapped a picture without my knowing. The tea cups are arranged in a perfect circle on their saucers, the animals are seated in front of thier prosective cups. The animals closest to me are the ones I like best. I am chatting with Blue Bear and Sock Monkey (they had better names, but I don’t remember them.) while serving them their tea.
Around this time, I was obsessed with the movie Annie with Carol Burrnett. There is a HUGE Annie poster on my wall, and a newspaper clipping about the obstratrician who delivered me (My mom gave birth to me without drugs, and I think I took her too literary when she said “I never could have gotten through your birth without her.”) There’s a poster of a duck with duckboots on, which I thought was terribly clever. My dad put a shelf over my bed, high enough so the cat won’t jump on it, low enough for me to reach it.
On summer nights, when I was forced to go to bed when it was still light out, I would move my pillow so it was at the foot of the bed, and wait for it to get dark. Then I’d stare with amazement at the lightning bugs, just amazed at the beauty. There was a warning light on a light post through the woods that I saw blinking, and for some reason, I always thought it was the Indians in Neverland, and the light was thier camp fire.
I had a great childhood. (off to call my parents…)
DON PEDRO: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour.
BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. -Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Sc: i
My furnishings included a dresser, chest of drawers, twin bed, toy chest, bean bag chair, and a stereo. I spent many happy hours in the bean bag chair listening to albums on the stereo and eating candy. I can’t eat Hershey’s kisses without thinking of the Eagles The Long Run album.
My room was on the front side of the house, facing the street. There were two windows on the front wall and one on the side. Our house did not have central air and the window unit would only cool the living room. In the summer my parents would put a box fan, blowing out, in their bedroom window. This would pull a breeze in my window and accross the hall into their room. I would sleep at the foot of the bed, pillow in the window sill, and fall asleep in the breeze smelling the holly blossoms outside. I still love the smell of holly blossoms.
We sold our house as commercial property when I was in high school. It was an antique store for a while, then a bridal shop. The house still stands, pretty much unchanged outside. My old bedroom is now a fitting room. It’s where my wife first tried on her wedding dress. I still think that’s cool!
Sig! Sig a Sog! Sig it loud! Sig it Strog! – Karen Carpenter with a head cold
We moved around a fair amount, so there were lots of them, but my favorite was the one I had from about age 4 to age 9, in Clarendon, Arkansas. The house was originally an old dogtrot-style house (two large rooms, one on either side of a central breezeway) that had had the breezeway enclosed and additional rooms added onto the back until it joined the kitchen, which had originally been a separate building (as was common in those days on the western frontier to reduce the danger of fire to the main house). I had the room on the right as you entered the house. The room seemed vast to me at the time, though having driven past the house several times as an adult, I’d guess that it was about 20’ x 15’. There was room for the full-sized bed I slept in, another full-sized bed, and still what seemed to me acres of room to play. There were a closet and a bathroom off the back wall, both of which were part of the addition to the original house. The central room of the house (originally the breezeway), was mostly unfurnished when we were there and also seemed huge (it was the same depth as my room, but probably only half as wide or less – say, 8’ or 10’ by 15’), and served me as a Nerf football stadium. The overall impression of spaciousness was helped by the ceilings, which were somewhat higher than in modern houses – at least nine or ten feet. My room was pretty completely shaded by a huge old magnolia tree, which kept it reasonably comfortable even during hot summer days (we only had window-unit AC in the living room, which was part of the addition to the original house). The location was great as well. Our wealthy landlord/neighbors kept their horses in a pen at the back of the lot. Behind that was the levee, on the other side of which were a couple hundred yards of river bottom and then the mouth of the Cache River, where it flows into the White River.
Later, I learned that the house dates from 1865 or 1866 and is believed to have been the first home rebuilt in town after the Union Army burned the entire town in retaliation for the sinking of a Union gunboat in the White River just south of the landing. The house is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Marston House, 429 N. Main, Clarendon, Arkansas.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
::talking to the big chair with the coat hung over it::
“Mom? Is that you? Who is that? Hello? Heeeeellppppp!”
Yep, I was a freaked out little kid. My room had this Satanic wallpaper, white/grey background with big black things that looked kind of like a # sign that was badly smeared. Very hypnotic. The carpet was brown, where it hadn’t been burnt by my “experiments” or had spilt candle wax or melted GI Joe/Barbie heads that had cooked too long in my sister’s Easy Bake Oven. I had bunk beds, all to myself! One slid perpendicular under the other and you could crawl underneath it and come out through the built in closet on the side. Way cool.
My sister’s room was directly opposite mine and our closets shared a wall, I wanted so bad to cut a whole through it so we could talk and pass things and my mom would never know, right?
Army men, Matchbox cars, fireworks, chemistry sets, disassembled random electronics(phone, toaster, radio, etc). I remember I always kept food in my room. I had these old C Rations from my uncle and some other “survival” stuff stowed away in case I had to leave the country real quick-like.
Memories, memories…
Mike Mulligan had a steam shovel,
a beautiful red steam shovel.
Her name was Mary Anne.
SwimmingRiddles, I’m glad to see you say that. I too had a wonderful childhood. I have nothing but great memories, even though my mom & dad divorced when I was four years old.
My bedroom from age 4 to 18 was the bigger bedroom of two. The house itself was small, Kitchen, L.R., bathroom, 2 bedrooms. My mom and sister slept in the smaller bedroom in a double bed. I slept in a queen sized bed with my oldest brother, why my other bro slept in the twin bed. (It was a great day when we got bunk beds and got rid of the queen bed! The room was always a huge mess with little green army men laying about, and Hot Wheels tracks sticking out from under the bed. (I hope none of you have ever experienced getting spanked by one! OUCH!) The closet was tiny. I was the smallest, so I got the ‘bottom’ half of the closet. (mom added an extra bar about 3 1/2 feet up for me to hang my clothes on. For Christmas every year we got a new coat or a new pair of jeans, and $50 from my dad! (I didn’t find out until after I was an adult, that was his child support for the month that he mailed directly to his kids. Mom never said a bad thing about him.) I could probably go to my closet today and find pieces of a GI Joe.
I really had a happy childhood, and I didn’t even know we were poor. My best friend was the local lawyers son. He lived in this huge two story house with a full finished basement. Central heat and air. My house only had one of those huge gray water coolers. You know the kind I’m talking about? Water would trickle down some straw in the sides of the cooler, and a huge squirrel cage fan would spin and suck the water-cooled air through the straw, and into your house. The front vents were broken off, openly inviting anyone to have their hand cut into a million pieces. The on/off switch and lo/med/hi switch was long ago broken. You turned it on by plugging it in. It would blow you across the room. When my best friend and I would play outside and get all hot and sweaty, we would go inside and stand in front of the ‘air conditioner’. It would crack my mom up when my friend would say “Man, I wish my dad would get one of these!” I love small town life. I think it made me a good person.
New and Improved
Enright3