The House

The house on Newland Dr. was mostly built by my father with some help from friends. I don't know the square footage, but it was a comfortable house for a family of four.

It consisted of a Living room, a very small formal dinning room, (originally) a very small kitchen, two bedrooms connected by a long hall with the bathroom off the center of the hall. In addition, there was a long breezeway down the right side of the house extending halfway around the back portion of the house. This breezeway was enclosed with several windows on the outside walls.

As mentioned the kitchen was originally very small when I was the same. Papa took out the backwall and extended it into the back breezeway spaxe behind the kitchen. Therefore there was room to sit at a decent sized table in one portion with food preparation taking place in the other part. I'll note here that the renovation of the kitchen was a major event. First of all somehow a mouse got killed in the construction area and stunk so bad work had to be stopped until it was located and disposed of-most likely it was taken into the back yard and thrown over the fence. The second event dealt with the time of year this was happening. It was early summer I think and the flies were very bad that year. Since that part of the house was open to the outside for two or three days the kitchen was flooded with so many flies we couldn't eat there, so during that time we had an extended picnic outside where there were fewer flies.

There was a long concrete front porch with a couple of rose bushes in front of it. Of course the front door was located here. It had a skeleton key lock that was rusted and inoperative by the time I knew what was going on. Thus, our house remained unlock for a few years. Then, for reasons unknown to me Papa got out the penetrating oil and got the lock working again after buying a skeleton key from the five and dime store. A little later Papa bought a deadbolt lock. The odd thing is no one ever tried to break into our house while we lived in it. As soon as we sold it and someone else moved in they were burglarized almost immediately. I guess everyone knew we were too poor to have anything valuable enough to steal.