The inside of our house had 1960s written all over it,in a way that could updated but never fully disguised.The floors were tile in the kitchen and bathrooms,hardwood everywhere else.The walls were of drywall,sheet rock,not plaster and lathe like in pre- war houses.The windows were double glazed and were opened by sliding the panes from side to side.There were dual doors both front and back,one a screen door,one,the inner one of heavy wood.Each entrance had a doorbell.The basement came unfinished,unadorned except for a furnace and water heater at the foot of the steps.The cellar floor was concrete and unpainted,and it was cooler there tan in any part of the house.There were a number,four,perhaps five narrow windows cut into the foundation.
When I think back to those days,the most striking part of the view is in just how little there actually was in the house at that time.The walls were all neatly painted in light shades and there were very few pictures of any kind.Neither were there any bookshelves.There was a mantle over the fireplace,and on that my mother kept an ornate clock in a glass dome,The clock never worked,and we were never permitted to touch it.Our house,in 1966 had very much not been grown into at all.It was all there,all functional but it really had very little in terms of personal touches.
The floors were laminated hardwood,cut into strips and nailed onto the sub-floor.All of the house save kitchen and bathroom were that way.In those days,hardwood flooring required a lot of care,and my mother would wash and wax the floors nearly every week end.The living room floor was covered in a large rectangle of green carpet,not the wall to wall kind,but something that was placed there as an afterthought and covered up most,but not all of the living space.Underneath there was a sheet of underlay that was not quite the same size as the carpet and was made from something like horse hair.It was rough to the touch,and if the carpet wasn't set on it evenly,it stuck out and my father would say it looked like hell.
Inside the living room,we did not have a lot of furniture.What was there was functional,but rather minimalist,and certainly not beautiful.A green couch more or less matched the carpet.It was a boxy looking thing that stood on four short legs,and the thing I most recall about it was the roughness of it's surface.You could scratch an itch on it.It could peel up a patch of your hide.It had a matching chair that just looked like a big ,ugly green cube.There was a coffee table,complete with two matching end tables,a big stand up lamp,and that was about it.The tables were made of some sort of plastic laminate,the only wood being in the legs.The coffee tables's surface had a hole at one corner,where it had most likely been overturned on something.A pot lid perhaps,while we were moving.Actually,something a bit smaller that a pot lid.But the hole was always there,ever since I can remember,and I don't recall the event that put it there.Even by 1966 standards the living room furniture would have been considered "budget",if not cheap.The rest of the house contained similar furniture,beds in the bedrooms,chests of drawers,all made of some form of laminate.The kitchen had a table and four brown and white chairs.The dining room was a huge empty space,no heavy wooden table,no chandelier.Those were a few years in the future.There was an old box stereo system in the dining room,and a big stack of vinyl records.No carpet.
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