Your favourite features of your childhood home?

In My Humble Opinion
21

My very favourite thing was the pool! We had an inground pool with stairs and a diving board. I spent most of every summer in it.

Our finished basement. Mostly because my grandmother lived in the basement for much of my young life and we were really close. We cooked and baked together often. But also because when she was away I was allowed to have sleepovers galore down there. The floor was concrete (but carpeted) so we could jump around like maniacs. Junk food, movies and video games!

The lilac trees in the yard. Damn those things smell heavenly.

We had a brownish/maroonish fridge and stove. No one else I knew had a fridge and stove that colour so I thought it was neat. I tried Googling to find an example and I haven’t been able to. They looked sort of like the fridge on That 70s Show, brownish/maroon with a darker edge around both the fridge door and freezer door. My parents always called them ugly and eventually replaced them, but I loved them.

There was a small wooded area across the street from my house. The woods contained endless blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, crabapples, Saskatoons, and fossils. When in the woods you were hidden from the street, but there was a network of paths created by bikes and dirtbikes everywhere in the woods. Fun for hours of exploring, eating, and picking berries for baking. (Okay, so technically, one can’t buy the woods, but you could buy a similar location I suppose!)

We had a baby barn in the yard which housed the pool supplies, pump, and other things such as my bike and lawn furniture. It also had a phone so we could answer the phone while out at the pool (before cordless phones were around). The fun part is that my friends and I would hang out in there and call boys. There was a light inside, and we could sit on the lawn furniture and listen to music. It was almost like a clubhouse.

The laundry room had no windows and was in the basement. It was completely dark. I always loved toys that lit up (for example, light-up yoyos, balls, or glow in the dark stuff) and the laundry room allowed me to fully enjoy them at any time of day. :smiley:

This was a fun post to think about!

22

Was there a creek?

23

The color was called Coppertone, here it is in aset of kitchen cabinets.

24

No, but that would have been really really cool! For my water fix I would get to go to my grandfathers house a few miles away about once a week. He had a beautiful house with a sloping , manicured backyard that was skirted by a lake stocked with bass and perch. Man did we have some good times there! Just thinking about makes me - get something in my eye. Damn you!

25

And the sound of the wooooosh is deafening.
Thanks Zoid.

26

When I was very young our backyard was basically a big sandbox, which was a lot of fun to play in. Until I saw the original “Invaders from Mars” on TV, that is. The sandlot in that movie was uncomfortably like mine.
After my father ruined it by planting grass, my favorite spot the wet bar he put in our basement. I played Rocky Jones, Space Ranger there. The mirror was an excellent view screen. And I feel nostalgic about that show even after seeing the MST3K episodes, so there.

27

The downstairs/basement was almost (almost) a functional mini-apartment. If it had had a shower my parents could have rented it out to tenants. I used to love to go down there when I wanted some privacy.

Also, it was much MUCH cooler down there. My parents had a strict no-air-conditioning-before-July rule, and it could get toasty upstairs.

The kitchen had an island in the middle of it. Mom loved it. I didn’t care one way or the other (I was a kid, for Pete’s sake), but now that I’m grown I can see how one would be useful.

28

The 640 acres of land I had free range of. Well, mostly free range, obviously you stayed on the path when the farm equipment was running. Could bike around for hours and hours, and when I was older I took the truck out and did donuts. :smiley:

The basement, because it was almost all mine! If you threw a bathroom and microwave in there I would never have seen my parents again.

29

Closets! Loads of them, all good for hiding in. Also, the grates covering the heating vents were easy to pull out so you could hide stuff.

30

640 Acres eh? So your parents own Rhode Island?

31

A quarter-section of land is 160 acres. My family owned 3 quarters and our neighbour owned the 4th quarter. Being able to hang around on the neighbour’s quarter too meant 640 acres.

Being confused, I looked this up on Wikipedia, Rhode Island is 776957 acres. Quite a difference :smiley:

32

Heat grates on the floor so we could stand over them in our nightgowns on cold mornings. We melted crayons on them and floated feathers over them.

My dad’s cabinet Victrola.

Our back yard was small, but we had a wooden playhouse built by my dad and two swingsets. There was a pink crabapple tree that we planted when I was little, which was unfortunately killed by lightning a few years ago.

It’s on a corner lot within walking distance of everything important.

Nobody bothered with gardening, but we had peonies, sweetpeas, daffodils, tulips, and daylilies that bloomed every year in spite of total neglect.

33

That’s it! Thanks for that, I didn’t know it had a name. :slight_smile:

34

The house I remember most fondly was a big old Hollywood craftsman half a block south of Hollywood Boulevard that was probably built in the 1920’s.

The way the staircase stopped a landing that split off one way into the kitchen, and the other way into the living room.

The bedroom had sloping ceilings, making the area where I slept seem more enclosed.

The backyard was divided into three sections, including a somewhat mysterious garden area way at the back that was actually tended by the person who lived over the garage.

The giant porch.

The little bachelor aparment right outside the kitchen where Charlie, our houseman, lived for free in exchange for being our “houseman”.

And in the house before that one, which was amazing in a million ways, the thing I remember loving most was the way the backyard ivy and trees were so overgrown they formed tunnels around either side of the pond. It was very “witch in the woods”

And in all our old houses in hollywood we always had odd little nooks and drawers and spaces that were created for who knows what reason, but were very cool to a kid.

35

Conservatory on the second floor.

36

The open fields across the street. In the early 60s we lived near Miramar in San Diego, on the edge of the developed area. We had a tree fort in a giant eucalyptus. When it rained the vernal pools would come alive with all kinds of wonderful creatures. We had free access to canyons and mesas as far as we wanted to go.

From there we moved to San Jose and had miles of prune orchards across the street–not nearly as exciting as the backcountry of San Diego!

37

My folks still live in the house where I grew up. It’s an old, two story brick house built in 1860.

What I liked best was probably the front porch. It was a wrap around with a porch swing perfect for curling up with a good book in all but the coldest months. My parents recently had the porch removed after it became decrepit. The house looks naked without it. They’re having a new, smaller one built this summer.

When I was a small child, the playhouse was my favorite though. Built by my dad and grandfather, it was whatever us kids’ imaginations made it to be. In later years, it became, first a house for pet ducks, then a storage shed. Several years ago, Dad slapped a new coat of paint on it, loaded it on a flatbed trailer and delivered it to a new home with several children. :slight_smile:

38

The swimming pool with a diving board.

39

My grandparents’ house hand an indoor pool that was perfect for year-round skinnydipping.

40

Ours was outdoors, but the diving board was the interesting feature. I’d never seen any other private pool with one. And, because of the board, the pool was exceptionally deep - something like 2.6m. When you dived right to the bottom, your ears hurt.