The living room of the first house I lived in had strange paneling on one wall. It wasn’t until I was into my teens (and long out of that house) that I realized it was chipboard, finished with varnish. It wasn’t some kind of hillbilly thing; I think whoever put it up around 1960 thought it was Cool and Thrifty in a Popular Mechanics kind of way.
(It, uh, might have been my dad. Never was sure. I have a vague resonance with the notion that my mother hated it.)
If we are going with strange 70s wall coverings - when I bought my house, the previous owners had woven-grass wallpaper in the main bedroom - that had got all damp and musty. Plus, they had carefully added wallpaper panels to the closet doors using a totally different wallpaper pattern!
That woven grass stuff was truly vile to remove.
This lamp, displayed proudly in my home, used to be my mother-in-law’s. It also has a matching hanging light fixture, but my husband will not hang it up for some reason. 
I like this lamp because it boggles my mind that someone a) concieved of it, b) created it, c) sold it! Not to mention the someone who bought it.
I was also going to tell you about my grandma’s orange and white kitchen wallpaper, but then I found this site and I’ve been having the best time looking at it. I thought I hated wallpaper but I’m thinking about buying some now.
Why?
Were Victorian children not known to balance a giant ham studded with cloves on their head?
That, my dear sir, is a pineapple! I think.
Either way it definitely says “Let’s eat!” Looks like a great table centerpiece.
Yes, the balanced pineapples while closing their eyes and thinking of England.
Pineapples were huge in home decor for many years. The pineapple-as-decor has an interesting history, stemming from it being so difficult to come by and expensive to obtain. If you were holding a dinner party and really wanted to impress your guests, you presented a pineapple for dessert.** Eventually, the pineapple became the symbol of a warm welcome and was incorporated into home decor.
** Oddly enough, this is one tradition that has a current-world counterpart. When I was visiting Japan a few years ago, a watermelon was proferred for dessert with great pomp and circumstance. The friend I was visiting told me that I should be suitably impressed, as a watermelon could sell for as much as $400 in Japan!
Our house was built in 1975. We bought it 11 years ago from the original owners who decorated it when they bought it, and kept it that way. The first few photos on this page as well as some on subsequent pages will give you an idea of what we bought. Incidentally, the kitchen “wallpaper” was actually contact paper. There are also photos of the changes we made, but I like to think they’re not as terrifying as what we started with.
I should mention that all the furniture in the “before” pics was left behind by the sellers - some was pretty awful.
In the mid 80s, my husband and I were shopping for our first house. One place we looked at was owned by a hunter, as evidenced by lots of taxidermy throughout the place. The most interesting piece hung in the stairwell, so that as you descended, you faced a deer’s hind end mounted with the tail raised. We called it the Deer Butt House. Wish I’d had a photo…
Oh my. :eek: The front doors. The bathrooms. The mushroom wallpaper.
Do you know a guy with the name of Swampbear? :dubious:
A Franklin stove in the fireplace. Cool.
Can we assume this is what you had a long chat with the fairy about?
I remember the Pink House.
My roommate of the time and I were looking for a new place to live. (We had been essentially timesharing a small apartment for a while, as both our jobs involved lots of travel.) We had a notion that we might as well look at buying a house as well as rental options, because equity could be useful when the time came for us to set up separate households. Maybe the agent got the wrong idea from two guys looking to buy a house together, or maybe she just showed this house to everyone in the hope of finding the reincarnation of Mary Kay Ash.
She showed us the Pink House. It was…pink. Inside and out. And not just a little pink–not “pale red” or “white with a touch of rose”. I didn’t know they made Pepto-colored brick, and the inside was worse. A lumpy pink faux-leather couch lolled in the living room, almost appearing to graze on the mottled pink shag carpet. A small hot pink beanbag chair lay, nearby, suggesting the end-product of that grazing. The couch’s offspring, a rose-tinted ottoman, had strayed off to lurk near an armchair upholstered in pink floral brocade. Overhead, the ceiling echoed the carpet’s theme, pink veined with purplish-pink, giving the disturbing impression of being inside a slightly upset stomach.
The bathrooms were no better. Pink carpet, fuzzy pink toilet seat covers, pink wallpaper with an eruption of pallid roses. Metallic gold-and-pink switchplates and outlet covers. Pink cherubs occupied pink shelves and mirrored niches, inspiring a nagging fear that one was being watched disapprovingly by pupil-less pink eyes and about to be pierced by a storm of tiny pink arrows.
We didn’t actually reach the bedrooms, but from the hall, we could see more shag carpeting (in a darker pink) and a round bed buried in pink pillows and ruffly pink covers in one of them. At that point we decided not to give the agent further false hope, so we fled.
My grandparents had the most horrible couch in history. It was ugly, uncomfortable and was stitched with this plastic thread that would poke you every time you sat on it.
Shag carpet on the walls in a game room. Basically became a four wall permanent napkin (yes, even the door was carpeted). Buffalo wings get messy.
Not my home, a friend’s… Seriously, my parents would never give us a game room
It had a Pong coffee table, which was cool.
My friend’s MIL is into mermaids.
She has a coffee table similar to this one http://www.rsvpstyle.com/cool_finds/show/62 except her table has a curve in the glass where the mermaid’s head comes about the table.
Any ass catcher without a back rest. You hear that, you stupid bank managers?
My mother’s house STILL has that wood veneer on the walls to this day.
When I was growing up, my aunt’s house had a special room that nobody went into. The wall to wall carpet was white, the furniture was all white, and covered in plastic. It was the room we walked past to get to the family room.
When I was a kid, we lived in a house with walls that looked just like this.
My first encounter with particle board was at Girl Scout camp. The outhouses were constructed with it, and I’ve always associated it with that ever since.
Love the wallpaper stories! I’ll take bad wallpaper over a carpeted kitchen and bathroom any day of the week, however.
When my brother was a young adult, he had some friends (LONG story how he knew these people) who were the definition of “white trash”. 
Not bad people, but the way they lived was the only way they knew. A relative of hers - her father, IIRC - had made a lamp for her out of very high-grade wood, and the base had 4 panels. Three of them had, shall we say, normal designs both painted and carved, and the fourth one was a picture of a girl performing fellatio on a boy. :eek: If that wasn’t bad enough, they were small children. :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
