The house I grew up in: part two

I am not sure how many square feet the house I grew up in had, but the remodel the current owners did, made it a whopping 5,320 sp ft. Zillow also lists the year it was built as 1963. I was born in 1965 so I think maybe that is wrong as well.

The house was modern looking even when we were growing up. Maybe it was all the windows or the exposed beams on the middle level. I liked the details my parents thought of like the radiant heated floors. To me, the heat was most obvious in the laundry room. The dog loved to sleep there in the winter. It was comforting having warm feet when it was cold everywhere else. We did not have radiators or floor vents downstairs.

Downstairs there was also a spare room that went through many incarnations depending on what the family needed at the time. I remember it being and office with a couch that pulled out to a bed, it was a playroom, my brother's room and then an office again. We spent time in there playing with matchbox cars and building blocks, Lincoln Logs and Legos, Barbies too. We had one of those make rubber flower machines that really stunk but the flowers were pretty cool. I am not sure if we were made to stay in that room or if that was just where the toys were so we played there. At one point there was a television in there and during summer, my hour of tv a day was usually The Monkey's reruns and The New Mickey Mouse Club if I could find it on. From this room, you could see the legs of guests as they walked up the walk to the front door. If you got locked out of the house, you tried this window and the laundry room window first to see if someone left it unlocked.

Now before you went up the seven stairs to the mid level, there was the door to the basement. I always felt the basement was the misunderstood area of the house. Never painted or decorated. A sump pump in a dark corner, leaky windows and the occasional stream across the floor added to the scary dampness. There was a small room that my parents had intended as a wine cellar. I don't recall it ever being full but occasionally there were bottles there, certainly not when any of us were teenagers though. Mostly is seemed like a spider hotel in that room. At the bottom of the stairs and underneath we stored Christmas decorations and other decorations. Every year we would go digging around for the Trick or Treat pumpkins.

My mother also had a little area where she stored her art work and art supplies. I loved looking through all of that because I never remember her using any of it and it seemed very personal to me. There were large flat storage areas for her drawings and paintings. The wooden boxes of pastels, charcoal and oil paints were so beautiful to me. On top of a cinder block ledge there were a few other pieces of art, but I remember the odd laying down cow looking one that I think my dad made in school. They still have it at the current home.

We had a ping pong table down there and after my grandmother passed away, the pool table from her house was moved into the basement. A real billiard table with 300 lb slabs under the felt. I played more pool than ping pong and by the time I got to college, I was good enough to play pool at fraternities. The furniture that was stored down there was mid century modern. A blue floral couch with these long triangular pillow for the back of it was the comfy spot. Bertoia chairs with their orange and blue covers disintegrating. A boxy side board with doors that had fallen off held the plastic stereo. Out of date in the late seventies and eighties but super hot right now. I had a plastic potters wheel down there and an art table before I discovered boys.

As I approached the teen years, I painted some of the walls a strange lime green that was left over from my bedroom walls and I tried to make it presentable. We had parties down there. We would shut the door. My parents would open the door. We would turn the stereo up loud and the my parents would shut the door. We snuck beer in through the basement well windows and got caught once. At least I think we got caught....That basement was fun, not decorated enough to be really cool but enough to give us a privacy. Maybe too much privacy.