Grandma Evie's Stories: The Story of My House

The Story of My House

Not many people aged 65 go from living in an apartment building to building and living in a house, but I did, and this is how it happened. When George and I were married we bought a house in Winona, an older four-bedroom home that needed lots of redecorating and some remodeling. It sounded like a good idea to me at the time we bought it, but it turned out to be a terrible idea, because the remodeling and redecorating was still not done 16 years later at the time of our divorce. I hated that house and for the next 17 years after my divorce I lived in apartments, always dreaming of my dream house and planning it.

When I moved to Racine, Wisconsin, my daughter and son-in-law owned land and offered me a lot near them at their cost. Of course I bought the lot. And by then I knew exactly the floor plan I wanted, so I built the home at 6200 Charles Street. An added bonus was that there was plenty of land for me to have a vegetable garden and a dwarf fruit tree orchard. I am still there and loving it. I still grow most of my vegetables and some berries. The orchard became too much work couple of years ago, so I had it taken out. I hope to be able to live here the rest of my life.

Looked pretty rough at first! I came and checked the progress almost every day.

All done except driveway and landscaping!

Soon all the landscaping was done, along with the decorating inside.

Here's a closer view of the post lamp area. The boulder was found when they dug the foundation, and I kept it.

And the pretty arched gate with clematis climbing up it.

Here are my raised vegetable garden beds, with the hollyhocks border by the wall.

Later the hollyhocks were changed for day lilies.

This is my little fruit tree orchard.

These were matching colorful plantings in the back corners of the yard: evergreen, birch, and red-twig dogwood in winter, lilac in the spring, hostas in the summer.

Here are some pictures later on, after the front garden beds were changed a little, and the house trim changed from blue to gray. I love my little arched arbor gate that leads to the backyard.