While wasting time last night when I should have been in bed, I came across this house for sale on a random Twin Falls realty website. (I love looking at houses. It's one of my favorite pastimes.)
It was the house I was raised in.
My parents bought it when I was five and I lived here until I moved away for college. My parents sold it 11 or so years ago. It has changed hands at least twice since then and is on the market again.
I totally stole the pictures off the website so I could take a blog trip through memory lane.
I honestly can not believe the difference 11 years and a few owners can make. (It actually hurts my chest a little to look at these pictures.) My dad took so much pride in this property. It was immaculate as was the house when my parents moved. My mom took just as much pride with the interior of the house. From the looks of these pictures the house and the property is not the same anymore...but my memories are just as pristine as the log house was back then.
Almost all of my childhood memories revolve around this house. I had the perfect childhood growing up at 1792 West Wildflower Ln. It was the kind of childhood that is remembered with rose colored glasses and serenaded by a heavenly choir. Oh wait...I just remember the work. Never mind with the glasses and angels singing. (Just kidding Mom and Dad!)
All my teenage memories are from this house too.
I had my first kiss on the back steps. (I'm not writing who with or how old I was though. Eewwww.)
I was even proposed to in this house and I brought home my first baby three years later.
This property means a lot to me...obviously.
This is the lane leading away from the house heading towards the main road. I walked up this lane every school day to catch the bus with my brothers and sisters. Our poodle mix dog Muffin would walk with us and then return home after we safely boarded the bus. Our bus driver's name my entire childhood was Agnes. Her real name was Robin, but as urban legend goes, one kid called her Agnes and the name stuck. She was a short woman sporting a width equal to her height. She had to shimmy sideways to get down the isles between the seats to get after unruly grades choolers. One day she caught a kid writing on the bus with a fat permanent marker. She broke it in two with her bare hands. I had a healthy dose of respect and fright for this woman from that day on. Sadly though, that fear didn't keep me from laughing about her jiggly arms that wobbled to and fro when Agnes steered the bus. I often wondered how that women kept control of that huge horizontally placed steering wheel with such short limbs. Seriously, the woman was not genetically blessed.
...but I digress. Back to the house.
This is obviously the kitchen.
I learned to cook in this kitchen. My favorite things to make here were cookies, bread and homemade pizza. (all gluten disasters I can no longer replicate) This kitchen was remodeled when I was a 5th grader, and these cabinets are still the same ones my parents picked the late 80's. Also the same are the double ovens and microwave. That microwave is so old I don't dare say what year it was built. It was brought over from the previous house my parents owned. It's ancient and probably gives off harmful rays...but I've heard through the grapevine that it still works great! Where there are two chairs, my mother used to place five stools. One for each of her offspring. We ate up to this bar sitting on these stools for almost every meal other than Sunday dinner or when company came. I gagged down a lot of clam chowder sitting on those stools. I also slugged my older brother as hard as I could in the back sitting here which resulted in me being excused from the table for the night. I didn't care a whip because it felt soooooo good to get back at my brother. Starvation is worth it sometimes.
It was also here in this kitchen that I threw a massive tantrum while trying to frost a cake for a neighbor. The layered cake wasn't cool when I started to frost it and quickly turned into a sloppy sticky mess. I was so mad that I slammed a frosting covered spatula on the counter which sent chocolate frosting flying all over the kitchen. Years later we still found flecks of chocolate stuck to the textured ceiling. Good times...good times.
On the right hand of the picture, directly next to the counter is where my husband proposed to me New Years Eve 1997. I replied, "What do you think?" (Maybe that should have been a clue about how our marriage was going to roll. Sarcasm-a-plenty please...poor man.) We kissed a bunch (only because my parents were gone and we were the only ones home) and then went out for Chinese food.
This is the dining room.
Thankfully my mother didn't own wagon wheel furniture or a replica of the Last Supper.
It was in this dining room that I remember standing next to the window air conditioner unit trying to cool off in the summer. This house did not have central air and was ridiculously hot three months out of the year. To keep cool, my mom would also place a fan at the base of the stairs that blew cold basement air upstairs. As rudimentary as it sounds, it totally worked.
We had a big oval table for a family of seven in this room and I often remember it being covered with sour cream sugar cookies ready to be frosted; and every Valentine's day they would in addition be heart shaped and topped with a large conversation hearts. It was also at this table where I did most of my homework and sat with my dad discussing both high school and college schedules.
Our "fancy" dinners were eaten in this room. My parents were amazing and fixed huge Sunday dinners almost every week, something I find extremely difficult to accomplish. My favorite dinners were simmered steak served with potatoes or my Great Grandmother Wright's chicken and rice.
On Christmas morning, we were allowed to eat our sugar cereal left by Santa in my mom's good china usually kept safe in the corner hutch.
That corner is now covered in washboards. (A little part of me and my appetite just died.) The tile in the picture was not there when I was growing up. I know this because I remember vacuuming this room while bawling my eyes out. My mom had made me re-vacuum my half a__ job and I wasn't to thrilled about it. She was a good mom.
Oh, and she made those curtains that are still hanging over the window. Slave driver AND seamstress. What more could a kid ask for?
Wowsers.
Let me just say right now that I'm grateful, oh so grateful, that my parents were never into dead animal decor. Crap, I just remembered the fish hanging in my Dad's current den. Oh...and the stuffed pheasant. Never mind. At least a large antlered animal never stared at me from above the fireplace when I lived there. I would have had nightmares.
This used to be our living room.
When my parents bought the house, this wall was black lava rock with a carousel fireplace. In the winter my dad would make fires so big that they would swirl tornado-like and every once in a while a pane in the carousel would pop from the heat.
When they remodeled the house, my parents traveled to eastern Idaho and hand mined the rock that still adorns this fireplace. I loved how it sparkled and I used to trace the grout with my fingers.
This fireplace is the backdrop for many pictures including the awkward-teenage-formal-dance-date kind. Imagine braces, early 90's puffed sleeves on floor length velvet dresses, and tacky carnation corsages...and don't forget the big bangs. Yeah the bangs were cool, as were the sweat rings left on the velvet dresses.
View of the other side of the living room.
Looking to the top of the picture, you can see the large log rafters where my younger brother spent a few hours of his life every so often when us older siblings would leave him up there while Mom was gone.
This room also holds memories of lip syncing to Abba records with pretend microphones, Christmas morning wrapping paper mania, the infamous Gary Walker "Choose Your Own Punishment" game show, watching Dad write in his journal while listening to the soundtrack to Somewhere in Time, and the ever-scary-nowlegendary Grandma Doll. (that doll needs her own post...another time maybe)
And just for the record, I will never buy a log home for my family because I never want to dust log walls again...ever. I can still smell the log/pledge/dust mixture to this day.
The master bedroom.
Yep...my mom made those curtains too.
The hats, however, were not there 12 years ago.
It was in this room that my dad, while trying to shoot a small outside animal from inside the house, put a not so small hole in the window trim.
This at one time was our basement family room.
It was in this room that I would shell grocery sized bags and bags of peas from the garden in the early summer. It was cool down here and I could watch TV while I shelled. This all ended when my brother while playing Ring King on the Nintendo, lost a round, picked up the recliner and threw it randomly. It landed on the bag of peas sitting right next to me. I could say the peas saved my life, but I won't be that dramatic- this time.
The built in shelves housed my dad's Indian artifacts and model trains. The drawers on the side housed our piano sheet music and while he was on his mission, my brother's ACDC cds. Shhh...don't tell.
After he returned from his mission, my mom had this room turned into a bedroom for him.
It still housed the trains and Indian stuff...hence why we called it the Indian room.
The crazy tree stump table might have fit right in.
This was my bedroom.
My parents had the built-in dresser and desks added when they remodeled.
I loved this room. I shared it with either JaNae or Jolyn until my senior year when I had it and a king sized bed all to myself. The desk on the right was mine as were the right hand drawers.
What this picture doesn't show is the mirrored closet doors. They made the room seem even bigger than it actually was.
It was in this room that my Grandfather Walker drove down from Menan Idaho and gave me my patriarchal blessing, right infront of my desk. That is the best memory I have of this room.
On a much much lighter note, it is also in this room that I showed my first symptoms of OCD. I would check the baseboard heaters at least 3 times every night to make sure nothing was touching them. I was deathly afraid a fire would start if anything was toughing the heater. It was also in this room that my ever occurring nightmare of the "V" baby coming out of my closet to get me was staged. Dang that movie and the "V" baby.
This was my brothers' room.
The closet on the left was the utility room.
It flooded...a lot. The original builders of the home somehow passed inspections without a drain in the floor.
Outside the door on the right and on the left side of the hallway was a HUGE ceiling to floor map of the world. I loved it...even though the map had the city of Boise mistakenly on the Idaho/Oregon border. Silly National Geographic.
This was a little office area right outside my bedroom door.
When I was little, I would sit and read books for hours on the floor. When I was a teenager I wrote my high school English papers on our now super out dated computer and printer.
It was also in this room that I sat with two of my girlfriends as they were trash-talked a certain boy in our class. The phone rang and it was this exact boy asking me out on a date. I said yes. (why I remember that I have no idea)
The peach colored basement bathroom I shared with my sisters.
The mirrored cabinet doors swung out so we could see the back of our hair when we were curling it.
I can still see the upper right hand drawer filled with hair brushes, scrunchies and hair. Ick.
It was this bathroom where my dad unscrewed the massive round light bulbs and told us girls we would have to get ready in the dark because we would never turn the lights out when we left for school.
It was also in this bathroom that my brother snuck up behind me wearing the scariest old man mask ever and about put me through the ceiling when I saw his reflection in the glass.
The laundry room still sporting the wall paper my mom put in twenty years ago....and yes again with her original curtains.
The counter top here is where my mom had five name labeled buckets on the counter for our folded clothes. That woman has always been organized and efficient. I can't remember which one of us covered our clothes bucket with Garbage Pail Kids stickers, but one of us did.
Under the counter was the space for four large laundry baskets in where we were expected to sort our own laundry so it was ready to throw into the washer. It went, if I remember correctly, left to right as so: whites, lights, darks and jeans. The dirty towel bin was on the floor under the window.
Our back yard.
(once again...we did not have wagon wheels for decoration)
The trees in this picture look SO HUGE as do the lilac bushes lining the west side of the yard.
My dad put together the playhouse that still stands soon after we moved in. I can still hear the nylon ropes creak on the S shaped hooks holding the swings up as we swung. This picture also brings back memories of maneuvering the riding mower around the swings and yellow slide. Either my mom or a sibling would have to come and hold the swings and slide up as we mowed around them and the playhouse. It's amazing none of us lost toes in the process.
Sadly, we never played in the playhouse much because of the wasp nests that always came back and the kitty mess that plagued our sand box.
But other than the wasps and the kitty poo, this back yard was awesome.
Along with the swing set, we had a trampoline that we jumped on with sprinklers when it was hot and then slept out on on cool summer nights. (I slept outside until the cat messed on my face...then I chose to never sleep outside on the trampoline again.) It was also on the trampoline that JaNae and I would lay out on as teenagers trying to work on our tans (burns). I now regret every hour I spent baking on that trampoline...and I have the ugly skin to prove it.
Behind the yard was the field where we flew our kites while avoiding cow pies from our many cows lovingly named such things as Dead Meat, T-Bone and Hamburgler -just to mention a few.
Our field and yard bordered a property of a neighbor that had seven daughters. We didn't always get along with these girls and I remember jumping on the trampoline or standing on the fence separating the properties, yelling back and forth with these girls sometimes not so nice things. We also may or may not have sent water balloons with our three person launcher screaming over while one of these daughters was on their riding lawn mower.
To the west of the house was my dad's garden and orchard. Sadly, I couldn't get that last picture to copy and paste to my blog so I can't show how this property has changed. The orchard has been cut down, the garden is now grass and a paved road has been put in leading to a massive shed. I spent many many many hours every summer in this garden and orchard. Until my dad put in the drip system, we siblings hand watered the trees. My mom woke us up early about every third morning in the summer to pick raspberries. The other mornings she woke us up early to weed. I was always jealous of Jared and his pollen allergy...he never had to week the corn.
We worked hard every summer outside and my mom worked even harder to get us to do so. I have a ton of respect for my mother and the countless hours she put up with my dad's "to-do" lists and us ratty kids.
A few favorite outside memories from my childhood?
-eating ripe peaches and apples right off the trees.
-watering the garden too long and then sinking in the mud up to my knees.
-rotten cherry and rotten tomato fights with my siblings.
-lazar tag wars with my friends at night along with other neighborhood night games.
I could go on for hours writing about living in the log house...hours.
I truly had a wonderful childhood and I can't believe how a few pictures can make those memories come flooding back.
I hope whoever buys the log house next will take good care of it as well as my parents did...and maybe change the curtains. It's about time.
