Ever knock on the door of a house you used to live in? Ever had somebody knock?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the excellent documentary, Heir to an Execution, the filmmaker and her father go back to the tiny apartment that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg lived in when they were arrested by the FBI. An immigrant Chinese family answers the door and welcomes them in, completely oblivious to the whole history of the case. The daughter tries in vain to explain - she’d have to go over anti-Communism, the Cold War and McCarthy hysteria for starters - and it’s a fascinating interaction.

My father went back to the apartment where he lived when he met my mother in 1958. It was now in a slummy part of downtown Los Angeles, but the immigrant Central American family who lives there now graciously allowed my crazy white father to poke around for a bit.

I don’t know why, but microhistory on such a small scale is fascinating to me. The way neighborhoods change and memories linger - I wonder if I’ll be bothering folks in various Oakland apartments when I get older. I found grafitti from the 1950s down in my basement and wonder about the people who used to live in my home. Any interesting stories to share?

2

I wasn’t home when this happened, but my husband told me that one day a lady who used to live in our old house in Virginia stopped by and asked if she could see it. She said she’d really loved the house, but she and her husband ended up divorcing and they had to sell it as part of the settlement. She said she really didn’t want to do it but couldn’t come up with a way to make the payments on her own. I thought it was interesting that though she clearly had had some unhappy times in that house, what with a bad marriage and all, she had wanted so much to stay.

I kind of wish we’d gotten her phone number. We could have called her when we sold it 4 years ago. I don’t know what it is about the houses in that neighborhood - they really aren’t anything special - but when they come on the market they sell fast. Ours was only up for sale for 4 days.

3

I’ve stood in front of my old house - where I was born and raised - for five times.
I don’t dare ringing the bell and asking to take a look.

I walked down the street a few times. Trees have grown bigger. More cars on the parking spaces. The stairs to the upper floors - which I always thought so high - were merely a few steps.

The canal is still the same though.

Now I’m homesick again.

4

I was driving past the house I grew up in on my way to my parents’ home down the street (we moved when I was in college) and I saw a Home Open sign out front, so I stopped and looked around. Really freaked out the realtor, I think.

“So, did those piers they installed stop the substructure problem?”
“That crack in the foundation still growing?”

We bought our house in St. Paul from somebody who was renting it to college students, and for the next year or so, on big holiday weekends we’d get at least one student type dropping by to see if they were still having the big Memorial day (or whatever) bash… yet another reason why all the other parents on the block were glad to see somebody with kids buy that house…

5

I’ve thought about visiting the house I grew up in. It’s the setting for 80% of my dreams, both good and bad. Maybe if I see it again, I’ll stop dreaming about it…

6

Before letting someone in to look around this house, I’d have some questions.

  1. Are you going to cry?
  2. Could you do it later?

I don’t live far from my childhood home. I would love to look inside but I think it might be too heart-rending. It’d be all small. I’m not small any more.

7

When I went to Vegas for a week last year, I went to all the places that I grew up. I took pictures from across the street, as I would never get the guts to knock on any doors. One house, though (the one I lived in from the time I was newborn to age four or so), had the windows boarded up. That was sad.

8

We went back to the house I lived in as a small child, it was actually open for inspection before auction. It was tiny. I couldn’t believe it. The size of the spaces just didn’t gel with my childhood memories. It was sort of nice to see it though.

9

I had a woman who used to live in my house come by one day. I was in the process of completely remodeling half the house and it was missing ceiling, walls, and possibly a floor. I’m not sure what she thought of the whole thing…

10

Back in the summer of 1990, I and a childhood friend were driving around Jacksonville, Florida, where we grew up down the street from each other. (He’d never left, but I hadn’t lived there since about 1977.) On a whim we swung down our old street, and I went and knocked on the door of my old house.

As everyone else says, I couldn’t believe how small it was. The interesting part, though, was that the kid who lived in “my” room had the same first name as me! It’s not an incredibly uncommon name, but it’s not a John or Mike, either.

When I lived in Ames, Iowa in the late '90s, the house I rented had a poured-concrete back stoop. When it was still wet, someone had carved into it, “Bill & Ethel, Sept. 3 1953.” I used to wonder about Bill & Ethel a lot.

(OK, I’m not sure it was “Bill & Ethel.” Or that it was 1953. But it was a couple’s name, and I remember it was Sept. 3 because that’s my dad’s birthday.)

11

I live a few towns away from where I grew up, so I was biking near my old house and thought I show my girlfriend the place. We stopped in front of the driveway and I was just pointing out some stuff when a guy came out of the house and asked if he could help us with anything.

I said no, but that I used to live here and he responded “Oh, you must be a Telemark, would you care to look around?” So I got a tour of the old homestead, it was nice.

12

My mom and I had to go out to my old elementary school a couple of months ago, and while we were out that way, she wanted to show me our old house (I lived there from age 6 to age 16.). The people my dad sold it to had apparently done a lot of work.
We drove by and I was sufficiently impressed, and then she mentioned that the man who owned it was outside, and maybe we should stop and mention that we used to live there, so he wouldn’t think we were just being weird by driving by at a crawl. We did that, and he asked us if we wanted to come inside. Nothing was the same. They’d torn out walls, added rooms…it looked nice, but it wasn’t the home I grew up in at all. It was good to see that it didn’t just go to rot (My dad left it in prety bad condition.), but kind of sad, in a way, that it was barely recognizable.

13

Last summer, my sister and I went back to the neighborhood where we grew up for the first time in over 20 years. The neighborhood looked much nicer than it did when we lived there, but our old house looked tiny and a bit shabby; the big pine tree in the front yard was dying.

We didn’t knock on the door, but were tempted. We both wondered if the dinosaurs were still there. Our mom had painted dinosaurs on the walls of the back bedroom on the ground floor–our brother’s room at the time–when we were small, and then couldn’t bear to paint them over when we older. She put up panelling to cover them instead, and they were still there when we moved out.

14

I stopped by the house my mother and I lived in until I was 4. I knocked on the door and immediately wished I hadn’t . A very old woman shuffled to the door with fear in her eyes. She screamed “What do you want?!”. I stammered something about living there and wondering about looking around. She screamed back “GO AWAY!” so I apologized profusely and left.

I really wish I could have gone in. That’s where I learned to tie my shoes, for crying out loud!

15

This is a very touching and nostalgia-filled thread. Thank you, hapaXL.

16

I’ll never go back to my old home, because you should never go back to the scene of the crime if you don’t want to get caught. :smiley:

Seriously though, I love these stories but don’t really have anything to add. While I now spend half my time at my grandfather’s, I still spend the other half in the home I grew up in, which my parents bought from my grandfather when they married. So, my mother still lives in the same house she grew up in. The only difference is that her childhood bedroom is now mine.

My best friend, however, moved away quite a few years ago. I rarely go by his old house, but often wonder what it looks like now, and who lives there now. When he moved away, he left a great adjustable basketball net at the end of the driveway, secured into the ground with cement. I regret not asking him if I could have it before he left.

After my friend had moved, I thought about stopping by and asking the new owners if they wanted to keep the net; but I never bothered. One day I drove by and discovered that the net was gone. I wondered what they did with it; whether they sold it, gave it away, threw it away, or put it in storage. But that was a long time ago.

Anyhoo…

17

I live about four blocks from my childhood home, and I pass it almost daily. I know that the guy who lives there now is one of my old classmates, but he’s not someone I want to go visiting. Not long ago, I drove past just after dusk and they had the lights on but hadn’t closed the curtains. I could see that they’ve stripped the 80’s wallpaper down off that one wall in the loungeroom and have painted it a nice deep blue. I wonder what other changes they’ve made, but not enough to stop the car and peek thought the windows :smiley: I do hope they’ve made over the kitchen because that nice blue paint would really clash with the 70’s orange counter tops, tiles and linoleum in the adjoining room. Blah!

18

I’ve never done it, but this thread reminds me of a house near where i used to live in Sydney. The people who lived there had obviously had more than one visitor who was unaware that the previous occupants had moved.

They had written, in black marker, on the front of the house next to the door:

“This house is NOT a brothel. It is now a private residence. Please do not knock on the door and ask for sex.”

19

This is nuts because I’m in my hometown right now and walked by the house I lived in from 0-7 and thought about asking the current owners if I could take a look around. I didn’t say anything to them, of course, but I seriously thought about and now I log on and find this thread!

20

I moved from upstate New York to Pennsylvania when I was ten, and never had the chance to go back to the town I was born in to see the places where I used to live. Not long after the 9/11 tragedy, my wife took me out of the house and surprised me with a day trip to the old hometown to cheer me up from my depression.

I rmembered how to find all three places easily. I just drove by the first place that we reached, then at the second we pulled into the driveway. It was an apartment house, and apparently still served that purpose- but it was remodeled in a completely different manner. The door acroos the alley, which used to lead to the landlady’s house (an immaculate shrine to her parents, filled with antiques), burst open and a man staggered out, held onto the porch rail and vomited on the ground. We could see that the neighborhood had changed in 40 years…

But the third house, the one that my dad actually owned, was a duplex right next to my former elementary school. The school was a lot bigger; a field that seemed almost endless that served as the playground was filled with a new wing of the school, bringing it much closer to my old home. I walked up to the old porch, noticing that everything seemed a lot smaller now. A man came out of the door just then, carrying a toolbox. I could see that the place was empty- on the porch, I could now see the “for rent” sign in the window- and I asked the man if I could look around. He said that the owner was working inside, and that I could go right in.

A short conversation with the owner and his wife later and I was wandering around in the house I lived in from tha age of six until I moved to PA at ten. The interior used to be paneled; instead everything was drywalled and painted white. I first saw the stairs leading to the second floor, the same stairs where I perfected my stair-diving technique. It seemed like the stairs were 50 feet high back then, but as I looked at them now it really hit me- a lot of time has passed. My old room. once a huge echoing chamber, filled at night with monster-laden shadows and the filtered noise of the TV in the living room below, was now a white cubicle devoid of all character. It was also too damn small. I felt like I had become a giant.

I looked out into the backyard and beyond. The barbed wire fence and the crabapple grove that lined the edge of our property were gone, replaced by a lawn as neat as a putting green. None of the houses looked the same- every one had been either remodeled, resided, or removed.

The gulf of years seperating my life then and now caught up to me then, and I tried to remember everyone who was in my life at the time, starting with my mother. It has been a while- I lost her four years after we moved to PA.

I felt the full meaning of “you can’t go home again” after that.