Changes to our Tiffin Home
The point of this blog is mostly to post the pictures I didn’t have when I initially blogged about my childhood home.
When my parents bought our house it was the mustard color you can see in the picture below:
My parents painted the house “Shadow Grey” and added black shutters which I always thought improved the look significantly. The also built a porch on the North side of the house. Prior to the porch we had a door to nowhere. The door was on the second story and opened up to a two story drop straight down.
They took out the big overgrown bushes and planted various types of shrubberies around the house. They also built a warehouse around the barn and added several additions to the warehouse. Below is the view from across the street. You can see the flat roof that I mentioned in an earlier blog.
They added a driveway up to the warehouse and eventually paved that driveway and my dad planted a small orchard along the hill leading up to the warehouse on both sides of the new driveway.
Here’s a picture of our garage with the walls added to the carport. My dad’s first office was in a room on the west side of the garage (behind the lilac tree in the picture below)
Here’s another picture of one of our floods.
After I left for college, they built a new pointed roof with a storage attic underneath, they moved the porch from the North side of the house to the West side of the house and build an additional living room upstairs and a new office downstairs where the porch used to be, and they built a series of storage sheds behind the warehouse and started a storage shed rental business.
Mom and Dad bought the house at a sheriff’s auction, I believe. The bottom floor had been a beauty parlor, apparently. The exterior was originally painted army green, and when we moved in, Mom and Dad painted it that dark yellow color. I remember Dad got a little offended because someone came over while we were painting (I think it was Brother Runion, not the Runions who lived in the bottom floor), and asked why we were painting the house the color of baby poo.
Dad’s first business colors were green and tan, matching the house, and his bird sign out front matched. I don’t know when he changed- maybe at the same time we repainted the house?
Dad’s first office, on the side of the garage, had a Commodore 64 computer. I remember receiving a light pen as a gift, to use with an alice in wonderland game, and I spent a lot of time in that office playing on the computer.
At that time, we actually did keep a car in the garage, but I don’t think we ever kept a functional car in the garage. For a long time we had a white station wagon that ran on diesel fuel (It was a Rabbit, or something like that), and it was broken, for a while sitting in the garage. I remember going out with Mom in that car (to Fremont I think, maybe for a gymnastics meet) and she accidently put regular gas in it. They had to pump all the gas out, or it would have damaged the engine.
Your memory is much better than mine. I didn’t know about how dad bought the house or that they were the ones who painted it that hideous color. I do remember Dad changing his company colors multiple times. I may have to write about technology from my past one of these days. I remember thinking that light pen was amazing and spending hours creating cards and banners on print shop.
I don’t remember the white station wagon, but I do remember having a van that you could start with anything.
yeah, I remember dawn richards starting that van with her fingernail once.
Mom designed that bird on the sign.
Oh, the print shop days. Do you remember before print shop, when we had the plastic thing we could make cards with- it had interchangeable plastic plates that said “Happy Birthday” and there was a cake with drippy frosting.
To make a card you had to put in the plastic plates, like a printing press. You could fit 2 skinny ones and 1 large. then you rubbed a crayon lengthwise along the top and presto, you had created a card for grandma! i wonder what that thing was called…
I remember that toy too, I would love to see a picture of it if we could remember what it was called!