Throwback Thursday - Bedrooms

I took a class with Becky Higgins recently and in it she asked which pictures you wished you had of your childhood, etc.

I really wish I had pictures of my childhood bedrooms (I had two, one before my grandfather died and one after he died). My Aunt Dot took a lot of pictures but, as with most people back then, she took pictures of people and events.  Film and processing was expensive, and it probably seemed a waste to take pictures of just rooms in your home.

I can still picture in my mind some of my second room, but I wish I had pictures.

So I went looking in my old photo albums for pictures of bedrooms.

These are pictures of Paul and my bedroom in our first apartment in 1970-72.  I find it so funny that I brought some of my stuffed animals from home.

I still have these bedroom lamps.  They were my mother-in-law's.  She gave them to us, she said, until we got new ones.  Almost 48 years later, we still have them in our bedroom, lol.

This is from our second apartment in 1972-73.

I'm thankful that I have these pictures because really, in the early years of our marriage, we didn't take many.  But I wish I had more close up pictures of the things in these rooms.

Then I started looking for Mark and Kristen's first bedrooms.

When I was about 5 months pregnant we moved from a one bedroom apartment at Belden Ct in Agawam to a two bedroom apartment.  Kristen had most of the second room.

This is the story of the little crib.

In 1973 we moved into our house in Feeding Hills.  We had three bedrooms.  This is Kristen's room.

The third bedroom was Paul's office, book room, stuff that didn't go in any other room, lol. We arranged the room to fit Mark in when he was born in 1974.  We took a couple of pictures, probably to show how little space Mark had in that room!

He eventually had the whole room and most of the stuff in that room found a place in our bedroom, lol!

I am trying to go through my old photo albums chronologically and hopefully I will find some pictures of their rooms.  I'll update this post if I do.

Luckily, I tried to take pictures of my grandchildren's rooms, but that will be another post.

Its never too late to take ordinary, every day pictures (such as bedrooms, lol).

In Becky Higgins' class, she shared a quote from Take a Picture Today, Feel Happy Tomorrow by Annie M. Gordon, PhD. "In the moment, we think why record our everyday experiences, we will remember them in the future and they aren't that memorable anyway.  Even just a month later though, our memories of the event begin to dim, the details fall away, and what once seemed ordinary feels a bit more extraordinary." How true!

Throwback Thursday - Brick Carport Project

The year was 1979, and this was part of the plans that Paul made to make a brick patio under our carport.  This part of the plan was to calculate the number of bricks he needed, which was 1800.

A year or so previously, he had made a brick floor out of used sidewalk bricks for the shed in the backyard, and liked how it turned out.

The idea for putting bricks under the carport probably stemmed from the fact that I didn't really like the look of the blacktop driveway that went under the carport.

He decided to put sidewalk bricks on top of the blacktop, and did a lot of research and planning before attempting this.

He bought the bricks from Gagliarducci Construction, a paving contractor, at 227 Mill St. in Springfield.  They were old sidewalk bricks from downtown Springfield, 8 cents a brick if you picked them up yourself, which he did because he wanted to hand pick them. This was a real bargain.  Used building bricks were only 5 cents a piece, but new or used sidewalk bricks were at least 25 cents a piece everywhere else.

Paul cut holes in the blacktop along three sides for the anchors that would hold the 4 x 6 fir beams that would be the border. Then he had Kristen and Mark scoop out (with their little hands) the amount of dirt equivalent to 45 lbs of concrete (half a bag).

The focus of these pictures was the kids working on the brick carport project, but I love so many other things about these old pictures. You can see our cat Callie on the back steps, the trash cans with "Radtke" that Paul put on almost everything, his grandfather's old wheelbarrow, and my little fenced in flower garden. In the back yard you can see the shed with just the wheel of what was Kristen's bike, and Mark's bike with the training wheels on.  Kristen was 7 at the time and Mark was 5.

I have always loved how our brick carport turned out.  It is still perfect even after almost 39 years.  We use it as a patio in the summer, but we can still park under it in the winter.

Job well done, Paul!

July 2018 Scrapbook Pages