Old House Flashback

I still have a couple posts left about our summer road trip. Here's one of them.

We made one last stop on our way home on our road trip this summer.

Last summer LMS and I stopped by the house my family lived in for a year when I was in elementary school. This summer we stopped by the house my family lived in when I was in jr high and high school.

Unlike the house last summer, I do have some half-way decent photos of this house. This is one I took when I was in high school. It's a bit grainy from being scanned in. I definitely didn't have a digital camera back then...

This is an aerial photo that some guy did. Apparently he'd fly over farms, taking photos, then go to the farms and try to sell the photos. This is pretty much the opposite of the picture above, which shows the front of the house. This photo shows the back of the house, the barn, the pole barn, and a garage.

This house was built in 1888 and had had some work done on it over the years, but it wasn't a super-up-to-date house. It had one bathroom (built in the addition on the left side of the house, along with the kitchen) that had a blood red sink in it. The trim and closet doors were also blood red. Really not sure why anyone would want a blood red bathroom. Of course, the wall paper in the kitchen was pretty hideous, too, so there's no accounting for some people's taste.

Anyway, the house wasn't as cool as the one we visited last summer (no dumbwaiter or walk-up attic), but it had lots of space in the yard and several outbuildings that we were able to use.

I took these photos as we drove past. We had the trailer hooked up, so couldn't just pull into the driveway and back out again like we did last year. Drive-by pictures don't always turn out well :)

As you can see, the giant old trees have all been cut down, which is sad. One actually came down in a storm while we were living there, so it's not surprising that the rest have come down in the 15+ years since then. The cool wrought iron fence hasn't been kept up very well, either. It looks like the front door actually gets some use now (we never used it), and they've added a porch over it. I really like the shutters they've added, but I think the porch is kind of ugly.

You can just barely see a sliver of the garage between the tree and the side of the truck window, and now that I'm staring at it, it looks like a new garage with two bays. The old garage held one car and opened on a different wall. Wish I'd noticed this while we were there. Hmmm. Anyway, we used to get ice storms in the winter, and I remember one winter there was thick enough ice on the driveway for us to ice skate on it. So fun!

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An interesting (maybe?) fact:

It was right about at that bush that I got hit by a van while running when I was in ninth grade.

This was my first time being back in the area in 16 years and I was surprised at how much I remembered, what was still there, and what had changed.