I was just at my dear friendâÂÂs parentsâ home yesterday with her when she was in town for a visit. I had helped them re-do their kitchen when her sister got married 28 years ago. I walked in yesterday, and nothing had changed. Same flooring, wallpaper, cabinets, paint, kitchen table fixture. Amazingly, the sheet vinyl flooring, tho the color was dated, looked almost new, and everything was well-maintained. It was such a fun afternoon, and felt kind of nice to have something familiar and stable there.

That is nice, les! I should have added in my post that my friend's mom's house was still immaculate, much like the one you describe. It was a bit jarring for me to see that so little had changed, but it also felt nice to see everything so familiar, and obviously well tended.

My MIL's house is frozen in time. She hasn't changed anything since 1948. OK, she had her sofa covered in the SAME fabric but that doesn't really count, right?
She is 87 years old and has only purchased one living and one dining room set in her life.

I gave her a set of new ($$$) sheets and she gave them away. Everything in her house is her friends, down to her dishtowels. She hates new things. She has had the same bath towels hanging in her bathroom since she got married! (No one has ever been allowed to use them.)

My mother lives in the house that my grandparents built in the mid 40's. The decor has been practically the same since then. My grandmother would periodically re-wallpaper and paint, but most of the choices were similar to the originals. The kitchen has the original white painted cabinets with built in metal lined sugar and flour drawers, and it still sports the original yellow and blue tile counters. My grandmother's original dining set is in the dining room. Sometime in the 60s or 70s she had wall to wall carpeting installed, and vinyl was laid in place of the original linoleum. I am trying to convince my mother to uncover the wood floors and put area rugs over them.

I grew up in only 1 house and I moved out when I was 22. When I was about 10 (1965), my parents decorated our small downstairs 1/2 bath. It had pink and brown tile halfway up the walls and then my parents added wallpaper which was white background with pink, green and brown flowers/leaves/stems.

About 5 years ago, my sister ran into the current owner of that house and we were invited to come for a visit. The living room fireplace was identical, the white oak flooring was the same, the kitchen cabinets were the same...and that awful, ugly bathroom was identical...even down to the cracked marble threshold!

I have no desire to see any more time warp homes. Going back to our old house really was pretty depressing.

'....They say "you can't go home again" - but sometimes something will happen that does enable you to revisit your childhood in a very powerful way.'
Sadly, not to me....I envy you,Jen. I'm sentimental, a great lover of nostalgia, but revisited places have always left me cold. I had a similar reaction to Patser's when I 'toured' my childhood home: depressing and a little sad. I am ambushed unawares frequently by smells, though. Wish they weren't so ephemeral. Often, I cannot grasp the cause, the place in time this odor has reminded me of...just childhood.

I do understand the sadness - the bittersweetness - that returning to a childhood home could evoke. I am quite certain I'd be overwhelmingly sad if I ever had an opportunity to revisit my childhood homes. Oddly enough, I'd still jump at the chance to do so. I often dream of those homes, and seeing them as they have changed throughout the years - or seeing how they had stayed the same - would be a fascinating exercise in delving into my own personal storehouse of memories and the emotions encased therein.

Memory is such an incredible thing. I'm kind of struggling today with memories of Christmases long past. I guess I'm just feeling sad that what once was a magical part of my life will never again be experienced quite the same way. ::sigh::

My grandparents' house never changed. Oh, once there was a new slipcover on a chair, or some new towels in the kitchen, but that was about it. According to my father, the big changes since he was a kid were 1) a refrigerator to replace the ice box and 2) the advent of a television to replace the big radio.

After my grandparents died, an uncle and his family moved in and they changed everything--new paint, wallpaper, new floor in the kitchen.

Then Uncle and Aunt moved to assisted living and the house was sold. Last year, my brother was back in town and we drove out to the house so he could take a picture of it. The new owners saw us and asked what we were doing. We explained who we were and they very kindly offered to let us take a final look around the house.

Interestingly, they've brought the house back to very, very close to the way it was when we were kids. The fussy wallpaper is gone and calm, neutral colors are back on the walls. They have a dining room set eerily like my grandparents. The furniture in the living is arranged pretty much the same way. There's even a chest in the upstairs hall where my grandmother had one. And it wasn't just me, my brother was exclaiming over the same things. And it's not as if the house was new when my GPs' bought it--the house was built around 1875 and my GPs' bought it in 1930. But the new owners have a lot of furniture from about the same era.

We were able to tell the new owners a lot about the house and how it looked, explained why the kitchen is much newer than the rest of the house (lightening caused a fire in 1938 and the kitchen had be redone), the colors of the walls, the reason for the odd ceiling light in the basement (used to hang over a pool table). They were very kind and I had a great walk down memory lane.