Is it better sometimes to stick with your memories?
My mother’s parents had a summer place in New Hampshire, a farmhouse with attached barn they’d turned into a lovely summer home – cozy kitchen, quirky rooms and staircases, a garden in the adjoining small mowed pasture, a bigger field going back to nature beyond, a huge blackberry tangle out back of the house, a well in the breezeway between the house and barn – I won’t yammer on with all the wonderful details I remember. Suffice it to say, it was a wonderful place for us kids as well as the adults.
Eventually my grandparents got too old, had to sell it. Some years later, my mother was passing nearby and decided to go see the old place. The people living there were delighted to meet her and proudly showed her around the place as they’d fixed it up.
Mom was devastated. So much was changed! Even the blackberry jungle – so deep you could only pick from the edge – was removed. She bitterly regretted having gone.
I’m facing the same visit or don’t question in a smaller way now. My late horse Ben boarded at a local place that was wonderful – huge grass paddocks, huge stalls in a charming old building in a lovely setting – and we left for his last home only because the property was sold. Having seen one of the pastures dug to perc it before we left, I believe there was going to be a house built there, and quite possibly the stable would be revamped or even torn down and a new one built. it would still be a horse property, but changed.
I drive by the entrance to the place often – a driveway leading off between other houses before it gets to the horse property, which is not visible from the road – and sometimes I think about going to see what’s become of the place.
Then I recall my mother’s experience, and drive on.
What’s been your experience? Have you gone back? Did you regret it, if you did?
Moved back to Alaska after a 30 year absence and loved it. The oil people changed it some, but I love the environment there. It was with regret that we moved out again when we retired.
Google street view is useful for virtually revisiting places, assuming the street mappers drove down your street.
It helps me to see that the home I grew up in has now become my brother’s hoarder home, and I’ll never go back again. I’m estranged from my brother, so it doesn’t bother me much. But man, the house looks nightmarish.
My grandparents owned a lot on the Magothy River that they’d bought in the 40s. My grandfather built a little wooden shack where they stored the outboard, some tools, spare bathing suits and towels, swimming toys, and a few cans of ravioli (yeah, that can of ravioli is a strong memory.) When I was a teen, they got permission to build a slightly larger building with indoor plumbing. The last time I was there was the summer of '73, just before I left for Navy boot camp. Sometime before 1980, they decided they were too old to deal with it any longer and neither my parents nor any of my siblings wanted to buy it, so it was sold.
Sometime in the late 80s, my husband and I were boating on the Chesapeake Bay and made a side trip up the Magothy to see the old place. The original 1940s shack was still there, but the newer building was replaced by an honest-to-goodness house. I recognized the area, but seeing it almost 20 years later from the water side was odd.
Then a few years back when one of my cousins died and the funeral home was in that part of the county, my mom, sister, and I managed to find the old dead-end road where the lot is and we stood outside the gate. The neighboring properties were much as we’d all remembered, but my grandparents’ old property was too changed to mean much to us.
I found the county records - my grandfather sold it in 1983 for $41K. Current assessed value is $679K on an 8320 Sq Ft lot with a house and carport. Yoiks!!
Both houses in which my parents were raised have been sold to people outside the family. Both houses have been updated and modernized, but the basic layouts have not been significantly altered. I and other family members have been welcomed to visit both places by the current owners, who have been most gracious and are eager to hear stories of the histories of the dwellings.
For example, I loved my time in college. It was kind of distressing to see it change for the first 5-10 years after I graduated as I went back for football games. I was seeing it change in real-time, more or less. But my father ended up becoming too infirm to keep going to games, so I quit.
Fast forward 20 years or so, and I went back for my nephew’s graduation. It wasn’t as disturbing, mostly because it was so different that I didn’t really think of it as the same place, or where I did, only tangentially so. It just wasn’t “my school” that was changing like it had been, it was somewhere else entirely.
I would not visit, but I am a highly sentimental individual. I lost my horse Bob over 12 years ago. I drive by his boarding barn and know I could not go in without experiencing heartache over all the good times. I drive by it on my way to the barn where I have Ariel, the chestnut TB mare….
We bought our home in Portland in 2009 for $350K, which was the upper edge of what we wanted to spend, especially for a two BR single level of about 1300sf. We sold it two years ago for $720K. We literally sat there with our mouths hanging open when the realtor presented the offers.
I drove by my first house a few years ago.
I was annoyed to see that they had removed the stained-glass window I designed, made, and installed in the door to the patio I added.
Oh, well - I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.
Every year when I return to Chicagoland, I go by my childhood home. It’s the last house on that street that isn’t a McMansion. I walk there with my brother-in-law, and I cover my eyes as it’s about to come into view and ask him if it’s safe to open them again. One of these days it won’t be.
On the other hand, I’ll never go back inside the high school where I taught for so long. Of the 5 classrooms I had over the years, zero are still standing due to various remodeling projects. I was in the last one for 20 years. After I left, the idiot principal decided to knock down a wall separating two classrooms and move the school office in there. Joke’s on him: it was freezing in there most of the school year. Now the office staff complains about having to wear jackets and fingerless gloves.
A woman who spent her early years growing up in my now-home has stopped by twice (20 years apart) and I’ve given her the tour, with her telling me about her memories. Nothing much has changed here since she grew up here, so she’s had a good experience.
Over the years, I’ve found several small wooden blocks and a locket in the air ducts, and have given them to her.
I hope the people I bought my condo from in 1996 never come back to check it out. I’ve replaced appliances and completely redecorated it to my own taste rather than (shudder) theirs. The layout remains the same but the character has changed completely.
I posted about this don’t-go-back on Facebook and my sister replied she’d driven up the driveway a couple of times in the last few years. The exterior of the house hasn’t changed much but she has no desire to see more. A fellow boarder at the barn we had to leave has also not gone back to look and doesn’t intend to.
The house I grew up in between second grade and when I moved out now belongs to my younger brother and his wife. They’ve made a few changes to the exterior and grounds, and redecorated the interior to reflect their tastes; they also converted the two-car garage into a studio for her to do her sculpture in. I have to say I like what they’ve done, with one exception: they replaced the old giant gas stove, a dinosaur from the 1950s if not earlier, with a modern stove. I fully get why, but the old one had some neat features about it I liked. Still, I got used to it, and I’m not the one who’d have to cook on it anyway. It may have helped that I saw the changes take place gradually over the years as I visited, plus they have excellent taste.
A week or so ago, I got to thinking about the house where I grew up and I considered sending a letter to the current occupant with a couple of questions and my email address. My parents sold the place in 1979 and I have no doubt that changes have been made over the last 45 years, but I’m curious about a couple of things my dad had built-in - are they still there? I know somewhere along the way, someone added a/c and also tore out the beautiful flower gardens my mom had planted and got rid of the thick hedge of forsythia that shielded the back yard from the side street. (Thanks Google street view!)
I don’t think I want to see the inside again because it won’t be the house I remember. But I still wonder. FWIW, my folks bought the place in 1956 for $10400 and sold it in '79 for $40K. The current assessment (according to the state records) is $160K. Redfin says $205K. It last sold 30 years ago - I guess the buyer really likes the place.
I was about to say that a less-than-threefold increase over nearly 60 years seems like pretty poor performance, but then I thought 1966 might be a typo. Which you later confirmed.
My mother bought her Maryland townhouse for $15,000 in 1969, and Zillow gives it a value today of $317,000.
I asked a somewhat similar question just before the world went all pandemic-y.
My conclusion was: No you can’t – everything changes so much it’s unrecognizable.
Quoting myself: Since it’s been 35 years, I decided to visit the old neighborhood and schoolgrounds. My first reaction was “Holy Crap what happened here?”. I drove into a blighted area featuring tattoo parlors, smoke shops, and plasma donation centers. The only recognizable business was a closed and boarded Walgreens. About the first stop sign, I was approached by a couple begging for gas money. I had trouble finding my old house due to changed (and 1-way) streets but eventually found it using a phone app. The area looked like part of a post-apocalyptic movie scene, and I was afraid to even get out of the car. I tried to take a picture of our old house, but the sketchy looking group hanging out front made me rethink it. Our little house was barely enough for the 4 of us back in the day, and now I counted 6 cars crowded into the driveway and yard.
Before leaving, I drove by the first apartment MizPullin and I rented after getting married. It had deteriorated as well.
One odd thing I noticed was every dwelling had twice as many cars as when I lived there all those years ago. The driveways and yards were full and the apartment parking was overflowing onto the surrounding streets. I’m not sure whether this represents people owning more cars, or more people in each dwelling.
This thread made me nostalgic for a place I lived in Hot Springs Arkansas, but I can’t find it in Google street view. Maybe I’m remembering the wrong address, or it got renamed. I remember being able to see Lake Catherine to the south, but I can’t find my old neighborhood. Of course, it was over 45 years ago. I at least managed to find the school I went to.
On the flip side, a few years ago, my sister found a real estate listing for the suburban Baltimore row house we had grown up in in the 1960s. Someone had significantly renovated and upgraded it to modern tastes, making it much nicer than it had been when we lived there.
The house I lived in from ages 14 to 18 looks pretty much the same but, like the rest of the neighborhood, now has mature trees. I guess this is because of the HOA and deed restrictions preventing any substantial changes.
The house I lived in up to age 14 has been significantly altered inside. They ruined the flow of the house by closing off a certain hallway and made the family room useless by opening up two of the walls. Outside, they removed the two Japanese Weeping cherry trees. Maybe they had become intrusive, but those two trees were noteworthy even in a neighborhood with crabapple trees lining the streets.