Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We lived in a big single-family house, 3600 sq ft on 1/3 acre, which is large by suburban SoCal standards. My parents liked modern art and fine furniture, so the house was full of those things. We had three giant olive trees, three giant orange trees (left from when the area had been an orchard), other fruit trees, lots of roses and big grassy lawns both front and back. It was a great place for kids to grow up and I still miss it.
1600 sq ft ranch home on a 1/4 acre view lot overlooking the Santa Monica mountains. Backyard had two apricot trees, an orange tree, lemon tree, raspberries, and strawberries with a lot of calla lilies and flowers surrounding the lawn and hanging flower baskets from the patio overhang. A doughboy pool was off to one side of the backyard. The interior of our house was nothing special. One of the first original tract homes in our bedroom community outside of Los Angeles.
Last edited by smpliving; 04-25-2024 at 06:18 PM..
A small three bedroom, one bathroom house in a village of 2,000 that started off as a log cabin my dad built himself. A few years after I came along, he surfaced the front and one side of the house with crystalline limestone rocks that he quarried somewhere nearby. Some had fossils embedded in them, and a lot of them had crystals inside. The other sides of the house he surfaced with plain white stone. It was cramped quarters for four kids and two parents, but we were always warm and dry. And everyone in town knew just where I lived when I said, "I live in the house with the rocks all over it."
We had a medium sized front and back yard, and a garden in back that was huge. My mom and dad were both avid gardeners. We had strawberries, raspberries, cabbage, lettuce, cucumbers, and squash. Also a lot of flowers, rosebushes and zinnias, peonies, and a lot more.
In 1953 my parents bought a big old house with a huge yard. Some of my favorite features were the wrap around porch, the mudroom and half bath that we kids could access directly from the back door, the big open area where all the kids would come to play kickball, and, behind that, my dad's enormous vegetable garden.
On strange feature was a walkway lined with grapevines that no one tended to. So no grapes, but some neighborhood kid came up with the novel idea of smoking grapevines. Everyone would come over to smoke a piece of grapevine. Must have been a precursor to smoking cigarettes behind the garage, which we also did but much later.
Older two story with a fireplace and enclosed porch on ten acres. Two creeks full of minnows, frogs, and crawdads. Lots of woods, big old shade tree for climbing in the back yard, a sandbox. A chicken coop with a dozen hens and a mean old rooster. Half acre vegetable garden, lots of flowering shrubs, wild flowers and berries, and my own little garden I planted in and around an old tree stump.
A kid's paradise.
We moved a lot when I was growing up so I figure I must have lived in close to a dozen houses. The only garden I can remember was in the back yard in one of the houses in St. Louis where my parents grew tomatoes, peppers and cactus.
The only house where we didn't live near railroad tracks or the airport was a beach house in California. It was infested with sand fleas and the ocean gave off a terrible smell, plus it always seemed to be cold and windy. I don't think we stayed there a year. I hate the ocean.
One of the houses in St. Louis was near a tunnel, actually a sewer system, where you could walk without bending down that went under the highway and came out by the airport terminal. My nephew said he used to walk under there as a kid and that it went farther than the terminal, all the way to the side of the runway but they sealed it off with iron bars after 911.
My favorite house was in New Mexico where we could walk a mile from the front of our house and be in the desert and about a mile from the back of our house and be in the mountains.
I looked up a lot of the old addresses on Google and was surprised to see what that house in New Mexico looks like now. I can remember playing games in a green lawn, but now all the houses on that street have gravel or sand for lawns, no grass anywhere.
Those houses in California we lived in were around $ 20,000, now they're going for $ 600,000 and they look worse than when we lived there.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
