My parents recently moved out of their home of nearly 40 years to share a house with my sister and her family. Since I still live near the old homestead, I have the task of collecting mail that hasn’t been forwarded. This morning when I stopped by, the new lady of the house invited me in to have a look around. All I can say is -
Oh.
My.
God.
You know, I understand wanting to re-decorate to make a place your own. I realize too that my parents’ decorating scheme was, um, conservative in terms of colors… heck, if I had taken over the house there are a bunch of things I would have changed myself. But the new occupants have really gone hogwild. The dining room and living room, formerly antique white and a light sage green, respectively, are now a shade of hot pink (for a visual, look here and check color #FF99FF). The living room carpet has a swirly design but is mostly purplish (color #990099). The hallway stairs (once light brown) are covered in shimmery dark blue shag carpet. Upstairs, one of the kid’s rooms has trim like the dining room color but a teal carpet (#009999), and the beige patterned wallpaper my parents had up remains… I could go on but you get the idea. I was dumbfounded to see the place so… cluelessly… decorated, for want of a better way to put it.
I thought it would take me a while to adjust to the fact that my parents don’t live there any more, but seeing the inside so radically changed leaves me feeling like my childhood home is long gone.
Try driving past your Grandma’s house and finding that they’ve lifted it off the foundation. ::eek:: All that was left was the basement, which at some point prior to the lifting had been finished off (when I knew the house the basement was for storing canned goods only.) The small town grocery store next door bought the land so they could expand their parking lot.
I stood there dumbfounded for a spell. My mom told me it had happened (when she saw it, she actually wondered if she was in the right spot!)
Then as I was driving down the highway, I saw her house sitting on a plot of land on the wheels they’d used to move it. Apparently whoever bought the top of the house had purchased land there and would be putting it on a new basement relatively soon.
It was hard seeing it gone. My Grandma had passed away about 8 years earlier, and I had kind of “put her” in that house. Whenever I drove past, I could see her in there just like she used to be. Suddenly that was gone. It sucked.
About ten years ago I drove by the house where we lived when I was a kid. I can’t say it’s “where I grew up,” since we only lived there for three or four years, but my earliest clear memories are of living there. I went and knocked on the door out of curiosity, and told the lady I’d lived there in the 70s and so on, and she let me in and we talked about the neighborhood for a while.
The most striking things about it were (1) that it looked impossibly small compared to my memories of it, and (2) the family had a son who lived in “my” room and had the same first name as me.
My grandmother gave her house to my older sister when Gran went into a nursing home. It doesn’t even look like the same house anymore; Grandma had a very bland style, even for the era when she decorated it, and my sister’s style is very … I’m not sure of the term for it; the style that uses lots of plush fabrics and leather and dark woods and cast iron and leopard prints and jewel tones.
The house I was born in has, fifteen years after we moved out, been resided (it was one of those 1950s little flat rectangular things with brick only on the side facing the street, and pea-soup green siding on the other three sides), there’s a new porch on it, and the yard has actual landscaping instead of the plain grass and small vegetable garden I remember. I, too, thought it looked incredibly tiny compared to my memories of being four…
I live in my childhood hometown. What’s more, I bought my grandparents’ house from my grandmother when she downsized, so some of my house is very, very familiar to me. Of course we’ve made changes (we’ve replaced the stove and oven that were older than I was just this year) but some things are the same as I remember. I find this to be very comforting.
Occasionally I drive by my childhood home. However, it was a drugrunners’ base of operation for a while, and so I’ve heard that the inside was completely trashed. I have no wish to see it for myself. The outside has changed remarkably. The old magnolia tree is gone (sob) and it definitely looks tiny now.
I had revisited the home I was born in and lived until I was 6 years old several times - at least the outside, My godparents, who lived next door to us, kept their house and I would visit them from time to time, and look at our house.
One time I was standing out in front of our old house, and a very distinguished white haired gentleman came out and asked if he could help me. I told him no thank you, that I used to live in that house.
He looked very surprised and said: “You’re Richard ****, aren’t you?”
He was the man who had bought the house from my parents in 1965. And this was 1993. And he remembered my name!
He invited me in, and showed me the house. It was much smaller than I remembered it, but I remembered the layout very well. He also took me down to my dad’s old workshop.
Well I “grew up” for 5 years in this duplex style thing. It had 10 houses on a plot of land and each person got a small square for a backyard. My backyard had swings installed due to my uncle. He carved my name on the bottom of the swings and carved a picture of how I looked around the age of 3 or 4. I moved when I was 5 and now I’ve been living in this house for 15 years. When I saw the swings they were trashed and no more. The only thing left were the chains that held the wood seat, and the chains were twisted around the pole.
I grew up in a traditional Spanish style house that was built in the 30s. My mother had terrible taste, IMHO, though. When I was really little the floors were hardwood but somewhere along the line she had orange/yellow shag carpet put down in the living room, dining room, and hall.
The bathroom was pink. I mean pink… pink walls, pink carpet, pink bathtub, tile… pink everywhere!
My mother cut brown/orange birds out of wallpaper and put them up on the walls, cupboards, etc of the kitchen. Are you getting the picture yet?
The outside was a stucco that was kinda orange until I was in high school when Mom had it painted a pale green color. It had a white picket fence around it.
My parents lived there when I was born and my mother didn’t move until 1986. About 10 years ago, I was visiting Los Angeles and decided to drive by. I was parked outside looking at the house when the lady who had bought it from my mother came home. I thought I should explain who I was so she wouldn’t be freaked out. She invited me in to see it.
She had taken out the carpet and returned it to the wooden floors. The paint colors through out the house were neutral earth tones. No more pink bathroom or birds on the kitchen walls. It was all very conservative tastefully done. The kinda place I would have liked to say I’d grown up in.
Oh, and she was an artist. She had turned the seperate garage into an artist studio.
The only thing I was disappointed with was the white picket fence has been replaced with a 6 ft. brown wooden fence. She had even repainted it a nice stucco color.
My family moved quite a bit through the years (my Dad’s a minister), so there are a lot of homes that I’d lived in. The first I really remember, where we moved when I was nearly three, was in Morenci, Michigan. We lived there for three years, then a year and a half in Comstock Park, MI, then three years in Manistee, MI, followed by one year in Interlochen, MI. I haven’t seen any of the Michigan homesteads, unfortunately, because it’s just too far to go. I would -love- to see them and in fact, the one in Manistee is up for sale!!! There is just a photo of the outside online, and believe it or not, I’ve got it set as wallpaper on my computer at work. I would so much like to see what the house looks like inside, but don’t see how that would happen unless I went to Manistee and asked to see the house.
After Interlochen, we moved to Wilmington DE, where my Mom’s family lived (and where I was born); I’ve been able to see most of the homes I lived in since age 11 in the last year. Most of them are in fairly good shape although my Grandmom’s old home looks run down (I should add that my Grandad moved out in 1970, after my Grandmom had passed away). While I was in HS, we lived in downstate DE, but I saw that home when I returned for my 30th HS reunion in 2000. Didn’t get to see the insides of any of the homes (which I would have liked to, of course), but it was very nostalgic. And most looked smaller than I remembered.
I just did this this past summer. My sister and I stopped by the old neighborhood where we grew up in Ohio; I lived there from 2 to 17, and hadn’t been back to it in 22 years.
Our old house looks tiny and rather shabby. The fondly-remembered pine tree in the front yard seems to be dying.
We were not far from a river, and the major change from the old days is that harbors have been cut out into what were formerly empty lots. The marina area now comes up to about a block from the house. A lot of other cluttered areas had also been cleared up; the wooded lot across the street behind the house is now a pretty little park.
I was surprised at how little the neighborhood otherwise had changed. Some of the same neighbors’ names were still on the mailboxes, although we didn’t visit anyone while we were there. And, to our delight, the old ice-cream store up the street was still open and we ordered “twisties” (half-chocolate/half-vanilla cones) just like we did when we were kids.
We moved around a bit when I was a kid, but I guess my “formative” years were age 8 to 14, which was when we lived in Levittown, Long Island.
I went back there once. It was much the same. The weeping willow tree in the backyard was bigger.
There was a basement closet where one of my brothers had done a bit of dinosaur doodling. I peeked inside. The pterodactyls were still there.
I sold it last year. My parents have both died and that was the inheritance. It was a beautiful tree covered lot. Tons of shade and ivy climbing the trees. The idiot that bought the place has gone through and CUT THE TREES DOWN!
He apparently wanted the place to make the large front yard into a car lot. However the city said NO WAY!
Now its this big, ugly sun baked lot. I hope he fries!
The house I grew up in was finished in Feb. and I was born in April (no, not this past year). We moved out in '77. When my father died in '95, I found a bunch of photos he had taken right before we moved in: house brand-spanking new, no landscaping around it, you could see the surrounding neighborhood, not yet built up.
So I took laser copies of the photos and sent it to the current residents, with a note saying I thought they would like to see old photos of their house.
I drove by the home I moved out of when I was 9 this past fall. It’s the same color, but it’s new siding and a lot of the windows were covered when they sided the house. They tore down the garage and there’s a new house where my pool used to be. It also looks so tiny compared to when I lived there. I don’t think I would consider it a small house anyway, but it seemed a lot bigger when I was 9.
I’ve done the ultimate in re-visiting my childhood home-I live in it again. After my Mom died, I moved back because my brother wasn’t interested in keeping it. I just couldn’t let it go into someone else’s hands. Thought it would be creepy moving back in all by myself, remembering the good and bad times from long ago. Shouldn’t have bothered to worry, outside of some memories, it’s been all to the good. About half the people I grew up with are still on the block, of course, some of them don’t realize that I’d been gone for 25 years. Family is VERY close by. Did a bit of remodeling, and some cosmetic work. Nice to have loads of space compared to my previous home. You can go home again…sorta’.
Oh sure. I visit my cousins in Cherokee and go there for high school class reunions every 5 years, although I don’t think there will be any more general reunions. You begin to run out of attendees after 60 years.
The house I grew up in looks even better than it did then. Good economic times have allowed better upkeep than we could afford in the depression. Not that it was ramshackle, but it really could have used some paint here and there. And a new shingle job.
I also can go out to see the farms where my cousins lived and where I used to stay parts of summers. One of them is now part of a hog feeding lot. All the buildings are gone and you don’t see anything but hogs. The other is gradually falling apart. My uncle would be outraged because he was proud of his farm and kept the building in top notch shape.
