Love and Remodeling at Home

I went home this weekend for Mother's Day.

But it wasn't a weekend entirely full of relaxation, because I had to do a lot of moving furniture. Moving furniture isn't so bad when you have nifty little sliders you can put under the legs of the furniture, but it's still a hassle moving couches through tight spaces.

You see, my parents decided to spend a lot of money to do some remodeling of our house. They installed new floors in the basement, completely changed the walls and ceiling in the family room, and replaced the brick fireplace that extended to the ceiling with a marble tile one.

And since most of those things had been in the house since we moved into the house in 1991, that ends a lot of my childhood. (As if being in my mid-twenties wasn't enough.)

Gone are the three lights in the family room ceiling that you could dim for sleepovers.

Gone is the fake wood paneling.

And gone is the little door that contained only the water valves, but I would imagine it went somewhere special. (Maybe even to a different world, but maybe that was only Coraline.)

Gone is the scratchy wallpaper that one of our kittens once used to climb vertically up the wall.

Gone is the gray carpet with no padding underneath in the family room and the tan carpet in the downstairs bedroom-turned-office-turned-theater-room.

Gone is the blue swirly wallpaper downstairs. Apparently this wallpaper covered up a pornographic wallpaper that had been there when we moved in, which I never saw until I saw the more decent parts when they tore things down.

Gone is the word "chores" written in pencil on the wall.

Gone are the flimsy ceiling tiles that sustained water damage and had multiple holes in them from exercise equipment and from tall cousins' heads.

Gone is the carpet from which I almost got out all the blood from my mom's Valentine's Day disaster.

Gone is the brick fireplace on which I strung lights for all holidays, on which we placed our witch and skeleton every Halloween, on which we stacked our Christmas stockings vertically, and on which, as a kindergartener, I staged some self-written leprechaun "plays."

(We will still have the hearth, although it will be marble, so there's still room for the witch and skeleton and, more importantly, leprechaun plays.)

And yet, with all these changes, there are even more to come!

There are very few things still in the house that are the same as they were in my earliest memories from the early 90s:

The yellow shag carpet in the upstairs bedroom is the same.

I think the kitchen pantry still has the yellow linoleum, which as a little kid I imagined was butterscotch (to go with our chocolate-lake brown carpet).

The bedrooms still have the same closet doors.

We have the same bathtub and showers, although everything surrounding the bathtub is different.

The hot-tub-room-turned-storage-room still has picturesque wallpaper, but you can hardly see it now.

The sunroom is mostly unchanged, except for a few broken windows that have been replaced.
Most of the outside stuff is the same--the railroad ties; the rock walls, seats, and steps; the rock path (which has been lengthened); the slide platform (which I actually remember being put up and/or painted, although it has had a few different paint jobs); the brick things lining the little garden by the front door. We still have the apricot, crabapple, inedible apple, plum, scrub oak, birch, chokecherry, and grape trees. (OK, OK, grapes don't grow on trees, but you wouldn't know that with the way they grow on the plum tree.)

I can be too sentimental.