Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What Was Your Childhood Home Like?

  From Randy over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  What was your childhood home like?  How big was it? How many rooms did it have? What facilities did you have? What furniture was there?

(2)  Share your response in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a post on Facebook.  

Here's mine:

I actually had three childhood homes.  One in Augusta, where we lived from the time I was born until I was 4; one in Jacksonville Florida, where we lived until I was 8; and the one in Swainsboro, where I lived until I was 18.  I'm going to write about the Swainsboro house since I lived there the longest.

The house had belonged to my grandparents, Charles and Ethel Tapley.  They moved there in the early 1960's.  The house was located on West Highway 80, a little bit out of town, up on a hill, with about 35 acres, half on each side of the highway.  It was huge as it was a converted store building.  The living room, which faced the road, had windows all the way across the front, like a store would have.  (Please don't ask me for dimensions... I have no idea.  LOL)

Here's the house before they started remodeling:

I don't know what kind of store it was intended to be or was.  It seems odd that there was two entrance doors across the front.  

Anyway, here is the house after my PopPop started working on it:

You can see in this picture, that he took the far right set of windows out and made it two separate windows - for two separate bedrooms.  He left the other window as it was for the living room, as I mentioned.

Here is the house after he finished.  The second one was probably taken 5-7 years later, since the trees have grown quite a bit tall.  

So going from left to right, the first door is the main entrance used by company.  It opened into the dining room/kitchen combo.  That next window is in the dining room.  While passing through the kitchen, I will mention that my grandmother's favorite color was pink, so my grandfather, believe it or not, did the kitchen in pink.  Pink cabinets, counter tops, and yes, even the appliances were pink!  I don't know how he did it, but it was the 60's after all.

Passing through a door opening with no door, you would enter the living room.  As I mentioned it was HUGE.  The door past the living room windows was an entrance we never used, and it entered into a tiny little vestibule.  I don't know why my PopPop put that there.  It was too tiny for anything.  And it had a door on it leading into the living room!  Wasted space.  On the back side of the living room was an opening to the den, or library as my grandfather called it.  The left side was lined with bookshelves and the back wall had built in drawers from floor to about 5 feet up.  There may have been some cabinets too, but I know there were cabinets built in below the bookshelves.  My PopPop loved books and he was a hoarder.  So he built himself plenty of space in the room for both.  

There was a set of glass sliding doors leading from the den into the garage.  The garage stretched across the entire back side of the house.  The left side was used for parking a vehicle and the right side was the junk area.  There was also a laundry room/half bath combo on the left side.  Eventually, my father made a 4th bedroom in the middle of the garage.  

Going back to the living room, start down the hall, and the first bedroom is on the right.  This was my Great Aunt Alice's room while she lived there and then it became my room through my teenage years.  (That's the next window after the vestibule door on the picture above.) It had red shag carpet and a rather large closet with a step up into it.  It did, however, lose a chunk of space to that vestibule!  My bed was a four poster and the entire set was white.  Then of course, I also had a stereo (one of those big floor models) and my desk in the room.  

Continuing down the hall, the next bedroom is on the left.  This room had twin beds, and it was my room as a child.  This room, because it was sandwiched between the hall and the garage, got absolutely no natural light.  It felt like a cave.  

At the end of the hall, to the right was the master bathroom and bedroom.  (The bedroom window is the last one on the right side of the house.)  The master bath had no window.  My grandmother was in a wheelchair so the doorways were extra wide.  The closet was a his and hers double closet.  After putting in the king size bed, there was little room left but for nightstands and a dresser.  

Back to the left side of the hall, was another bathroom.  This was my bathroom, for all intents and purposes, though it was used by visitors, too, of course.  There was a window in this bathroom and a large linen closet.  For some reasons, we did not use the showerheads, so we always took baths.  It was decorated with cheery yellow curtains and throw rugs.  It also had a built in dressing table with drawers for storage, right under the window.  

If you exited right out of my bathroom, there was a hallway that was added after my father built the bedroom in the garage.  This short hallway led to a doorway out to the garage and access to that bedroom.  

My father and his visitors loved to sit in the garage where a car was supposed to be parked and rock in the rocking chairs and feel the breeze from the attic fan my dad put in the other side of the garage.  It kept the cool air blowing through on those hot Georgia afternoons.  

Eventually, my father added a carport, a barn (that he never finished), fencing, etc.  There was a clothesline in the back yard; we never owned a dryer when I was growing up.  

So as I said, the house was rather large.  It wasn't fancy but it was nice by many standards.  Daddy finally sold the house and it looks quite a bit different now.  

I will refer you to a post I wrote in 2011 about my childhood homes.  It's not much different than what I wrote here.  I just went into a lot more detail today.  It was nice to see that my memories haven't changed.