Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House

Week 5 of the Book of Me, Written by You blog prompt series.

     The house that I consider my childhood home isn't the one we lived in when I was born.  We only lived at that house until I was a few weeks old, so I often forget about it entirely.

     Instead, I consider "The Duplex" on Cruse Road to be my childhood home.  It was right on the corner of Cruse Road, a busy two lane surface street, and... some other road that lead into the subdivision. Being the first house on the entrance of a subdivision, we had a large yard with one of those big brick neighborhood signs.  People pretty often ran into it, and my parents didn't like my siblings and I to play in the yard unaccompanied.

     My favorite memory of this house has got to be the back patio (and by patio I mean the the barely 5x5 concrete slab off the kitchen door).  The back yard couldn't have been deeper than 10 feet before it dropped into a wooded swampy area.  Every spring the backyard would be flooded by tiny little frogs.  I love frogs!  One year, McDonald's was on an environmental kick and was giving out seeds and tiny greenhouses in their happy meals.  I remember catching a frog and keeping it in the tiny plastic greenhouse for a few minutes.  Frogs!

     We moved out of the duplex when I was in third grade, but I do have a number of fond memories of living in that house.  Here are some photos of those times:

Babies on the porch

Our tiny garden

Our first bikes

Floor Plans - The Craft House

     My paternal grandparents, Thomas and Sarah Craft (aka Granny and PawPaw), lived in Lilburn, GA. They lived on a curve in the road with a large tree at the end of their driveway. There was an old well in the front yard that had been filled in at some point, though it never occurred to me until later that this meant the house didn't originally have indoor plumbing. As far as I was concerned the house consisted of two rooms: the living room and kitchen.

     The living room was where Granny and PawPaw sat in their recliners and Granny painted our nails. They also had lamps that turned on with a touch and a candy dish full of mints. The kitchen was a long room, but the main features were the fridge full of cokes and the drawer with candy bars. When we would visit we would watch rodeos, cooking shows or the Atlanta Braves on tv, or the two VHS tapes they had: "Mrs Doubtfire" and "Dances with Wolves."

     As I said, in my mind the house consisted of the kitchen and living room. After Granny passed away a few years ago, the family emptied the house and I explored the guest bedrooms and the (huge) basement for the first time. Here's a floor plan of the house, that I completed with the help of my parents:

Floor Plans - The Albea Family

     This is part of an on-going series about the homes of my family and ancestors. Today's house was owned by my maternal grandparents, Roy and Betty (Huyler) Albea.  Located on Larkspur Terrace in Decatur, DeKalb, Georgia, this is the house where I attended weekly Sunday dinners during my childhood.  I believe the family moved to this house in 1963. According to Zillow.com, the house sits on 43,560 feet and was built in 1957.

     The house wasn't quite big enough for a family of eight and, according to my mom, her parents slept on a fold-out couch in the living room for a while. In old photos I can see that the living room used to have plain white walls, but I always knew them to have wood paneling. There also used to be a door on the back wall of the living room that lead directly to the kitchen, but it was walled up at some point, well before I was born. My grandmother began to collect VHS movies for all the grandkids and had perhaps 200. My cousins and I would spend a lot of time in what used to be my mom's bedroom watching movies.  The backyard had a fence around it and we were allowed to play there with the two dogs, Putty and Caesar. My grandmother had a somewhat elaborate garden in the back, righthand side of her yard that included a banana tree; other flowers were arranged throughout the front and back yards. On Easter we had egg hunts in the front yard - adults vs kids. No hiding eggs in the sticky bush (yukka plant)!

     Here's the floor plan that I drew from memory, which mom assures me is very accurate:

Floor Plans - My Home as a Baby

This post is part of an on-going series about the homes of my family. Today's house is the one that I lived in at the very beginning of my life.

This house was on Allen Wood's Drive in Norcross, Georgia. Although I do not remember the house at all, I easily remember the street name, as it is the same as my brother's. My mom drew this floor plan. The house was a two story duplex. That's all the information I have now.

Floor Plans - Mom's First Remembered Home

When Mom was born, her family lived on Moreland Ave in Atlanta. By the next year, when her brother Lloyd was born, the family was living in College Park, just south of Atlanta. About two years later, the family moved to an unfinished house on Thompson Circle in Decatur, Georgia. This is the first house that Mom has memories of.

According to the real estate website, Zillow, the house was built in 1959 and is 1,426 square feet with three bedrooms and one bath.

Here's a floor plan that she drew of the house:

Here's the house on Google Maps:

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Floor Plans - Current House

This is the first in a series of posts that feature the floor plans of family homes. I hope to collect floor plans of my parents and possibly grand-parents homes.

I started with our current house. We moved in while I was in 3rd grade. This was the easiest, as I was able to measure the rooms and create a very accurate floor plan.

And here's a photo of the house. I could only seem to locate a photo of the entire house from one of the rare snow days.