"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do." - Dale Carnegie

Throw-back day.
After my mom got her hair done we drove to Everett, ~20 miles north and had lunch with my brother Mark who currently works there. But Everett is also the town where my mom grew up. The purpose of the trip was to drive by her childhood home. I remember it from visiting my grandparents there as a kid but the home was built in 1910 and my grandparents lived there when mom was born in 1922 (shhh!)

We parked at the curb and I intended to just take pictures of the outside. But curiosity got the best of me and I rang the doorbell. Very glad I did! The 40-something guy who answered it seemed genuinely thrilled when I explained who I was and why I was there.
"My wife is going to be ticked she was gone when you came!"

They have done a great job of restoring the house and it's currently on the Everett registry of faithfully restored historical homes.

With his permission I went back out to the car to bring mom & dad in, but only dad came. It's too hard for mom to climb stairs and the house sits up above the street several steps.

The front door is newer but faithful to the house in style. The place is very well kept and will be on the "Tour of Historical Homes" later this month.

The driveway leads to the basement where Grampa parked his '52 Buick. The current owners have built a garage out back - much more convenient and probably safer, too.


I'm pretty sure that Red Maple dates back to my childhood. He says the cut it way back almost every year.

Mom says the garage doors visible here are original to the house. Pretty remarkable 100 years later!

I didn't want to presume, so dad & I only looked at the kitchen and living rooms but that brought back a flood of memories. The kitchen cabinets are the ones my great-grandfather built, complete with the original hardware. They took out the mangle room (do you know what a mangle iron is?) so the kitchen feels a lot more open, but other than that it's just as I remember.

Really cool?? They started taking off layers of old wallpaper and got down to the original layer that my grandfather put up ... and left it! I'm tellin' ya', it was like walking back in time. (It's on the wall to the right, where the stove and fridge are.

The dining room and living room beyond are separated by the archway, a common feature back then. One of our 100-year old homes in Michigan had the same thing. The flooring is the clear pine (?) and left quite natural looking. The fireplace surround and mantle have been replaced at some point over the years but other than that, the rooms look just like I remember then.

It was a treat to walk through this part of the first floor. I could picture where I sat, where my grandparents sat, the Christmas tree by the front window (they still put it there) and playing on the floor in the kitchen with pots, measuring spoons and dried kidney beans.

My grandpa died in 1957 and my grandmother lived there until the mid-60's so I have lots of very fond memories of the place. Including the steep and narrow stairway to the second floor which is still steep and narrow from an adult's perspective.

THANK YOU, Sheldon, for inviting strangers into your home so they could relive wonderful times from many years ago. And thank you, too, for being so interested in learning the history of the house from us. To know you value not just the house's present value but its story made us feel good.