We moved from "the place" which was over on Cedar Holler Road when I was almost 9 years old. My dad had bought one of the old store buildings there in old Bradleyville.
That old building was probably 80-100 feet long and probably 30-40 feet wide. There were a few rooms in the back of where the store was that was living quarters and that is where we moved.
When we first moved over there, there was a large kitchen, a room off of the west side of the kitchen that was first our living room, a room off the east side of the kitchen that my mom and dad used for their bedroom, and that was it. I slept on the couch in the living room to start with.
I know Mom and Dad slept out in the store building part of the building for awhile, and there was another bed or two out there, I slept out there some, and so did Ginger, Sue and Venessa when they stayed with us a few days here and there.
There was a basement under the living quarters that was probably 20 by 40 feet or so. It could have been a lot smaller but it always seemed huge to me. In the basement was a small bedroom right off the stairs, where some of us slept sometimes, and the light switch for this bedroom was at the top of the stairs, then into the main room of the basement, with a pull string light hanging right in the middle. Then at the end of the big room was a small room with a toilet in it, and and beside that room was a home made shower, two walls was the outside of the building with crumbly cement blocks, the wall next to the big room was a partition somebody had built, and there was a wall built between the shower and the room where the toilet was, with a 2 foot square window in the corner by the ceiling, in between the shower and the toilet room. Why? I guess we'll never know, but it made for some nervous showers and bathroom visits, for me at least....and in the farthest corner of the big basement room was a doorway into a storage room that was never used by us, I think it had junk in it, plus vampires and werewolfs and all manner of monsters just waiting to jump on me as I went through the big room.
It was always a little damp in the basement too, with concrete floors, so we always had to remember to wear shoes when we went down there or we might get a jiggling zap when we turned the pull light on or off.
Dad also rented a building across the (driveway) road from our building and ran his garage there. He wanted to move his garage into the end of our building, and so began remodeling shortly after we moved in.
Mom always wanted a large living room, so Dad sectioned off part of the building and built a big living room, probably about 20X20 or so, and a bedroom for him and mom that opened off the living room, with a large walk-in closet across the whole south end of their bedroom.
Part of this time of remodeling was when we slept in the big big room of the store building, so there would be room to remodel.
After Dad got the living room and their bedroom completed, I got the old living room for my bedroom, minus a door. Now I didn't need a door, I was around 10-11 I guess, but I WANTED a door. I have always been a very modest person and I needed my privacy. It was around this time we went to an auction at the Cedar Point Resort in Rockaway Beach, and Dad bought me a big old ornate dark colored four poster wood bedroom suite. It is pretty, I still have it, although I don't use the headboard and footboard of the bed. But...I did use it then, in more ways than one. We sat the bed catty-corner across the corner of my bedroom, and later I pulled one side out about a foot away from the wall, and voila', I had my own private dressing room. Well, it wasn't all that private but it was better than my open door.
Sometime in this timeframe my great uncle, Bill Lawson, Dad's uncle, Grandma Mary's older brother, came to live with us. He was nearly blind and he slept in the room that Mom and Dad slept in when we first moved in. I never knew Uncle Bill very well before that but grew to love him like he was my grandpa.
He lived with us a few years before he had to be put in the nursing home....another story.
The remodeling bug bit Dad again, and he decided to build a couple of bedrooms on the other side of the living room, with a short hall in between them that ended with a door into the garage part of the building.
One of the rooms was mine, and right across the hall was a bedroom for my Grandma Mary, who had come to live with us when I was 10...another story.
Anyway, I finally had my own bedroom with a door! It didn't have a lock but it had a door! So...I wanted to paint the walls a neon green (which we called it lime green then, but it was neon..LOL) and have hot pink curtains. I thought it sounded so dreamy, so groovy, so hot....my mom said no and no matter how much I whined and griped about it, I never did get my green walls and hot pink curtains.
When Dad got through with the bedrooms, he turned the other bedroom where Uncle Bill had stayed into a laundry room on the south side, and a bathroom opening off the laundry room on the north side. Toilet, bathtub with shower and a sink vanity across the other side, with a lighted mirror. Boy I thought we were right uptown. No more turning on the basement bedroom light at the top of the stairs, going down 13 steps, turning, going through 10 feet of darkness to get to the pull light with the monster room looming in the corner. No more taking a shower in the public feeling shower, no more using the shower and the bathroom with the window in the top corner. No more turning off that pull light on the way back through and running like the hounds of hell were on my heels until I got all the way up those steps. No wonder I didn't have a weight problem when I was young...
The room he turned into a laundry room only had a wall going halfway up behind the washer and dryer, and the top part was open to the stairwell, which also played a part in Uncle Bill's story...another story.
Dad turned the north side of the building into a garage, he could walk right from the house into the garage of the morning. It still had store shelves all along the west side of the room which was pretty handy too. I spent many happy hours playing in that garage. After Dad moved his garage into Orville Turners garage over in the new part of Bradleyville, that old garage space became a big storage room and me and my nieces and nephew spent many hours playing out there.
That was our house we lived in until I got married.
No comments:
Post a Comment