If you look closer to the old photo – the silo had not yet been added to the barn and the screened-in-porch was still entirely a screened-in-porch around the house. My mom remembers when they got indoor plumbing in the house 🙂 she was about five years old so it was around 1958 when the first (and only) bathroom was added. Sometime (way back in the early 1950s) my Grandpa enclosed the first section of screened-in-porch to create an “entry” and added the front step and a new staircase down to the basement (before they accessed the basement from an outside stairwell, the imprint of which can still be found). Around 1968 they enclosed another part of the screened-in-porch and added a bedroom there to the side of the house. My aunt and mom got the upstairs two bedrooms to themselves and, as grandpa and grandma aged, the bedroom on the main floor became imperative for them. That was the last “remodel” ever done to the house.

My aunt and mom still talk about sleeping out on the screened-in porch to this day, listening to the frogs and burying themselves under the blankets during thunder storms or yelling for their parents when bats awoke and swopped above them. What I remember of the house is walking into my grandma’s kitchen, sitting on her stool (another piece I got to keep) and warming myself beside her kitchen stove. The stove was always burning in my memories and grandma always kept a tea-kettle full of water on it, whether it was for actual tea or for humidifying the house. And, as far back as I can remember, my grandparents’ kitchen hutch always stood there, holding all of my grandma’s nice china. The hutch is mine now, a gift from my mom and my aunt who either didn’t have a place for it, or already had one of their own made by my grandparents. The hutch will be returning to almost its exact place in the kitchen, close to my own stove.

It is everything I have ever dreamed of in a place of my own to remodel and grow old in. I am so excited and so anxious to get started.