When I wrote the post about our house in Lancaster, California back in 2012, I didn't have a lot of photos of the house. I had a number of photos that were taken at the time we lived in the house (March 1977 - December 1978) but they were often dark and blurry. Also, the photos were not taken with the intention of showing what the house looked like (understandably)--they were taken at events such as birthdays--so I only had photos taken in a few of the rooms and even then a number of features such as the stairs and "indoor balcony" were not in any of the photos and I had a hard time describing them. (Original post is here.)
Probably 4 or 5 years ago, when I was looking up something about the house on the internet (can't remember what I was looking up or why), I discovered a listing for the house which included several photos of the interior because it was for sale at that time. I was shocked to see how beat up and run down the house looked in these photos, but otherwise it looked a lot like the house I remembered and there were better views of many of the rooms so I saved copies of all of the photos to my computer, intending to create a follow up blog post about the house. Well, I never got around to it but that's okay because just this week I looked up the house again and I discovered that the house sold again about a year ago and the newer listing had new photos of the house. From the photos, it is obvious that at some point the house was purchased and renovated. It looks so much nicer now! Although there are a number of changes to the house, it is still quite recognizable as the house that we lived in. Whoever fixed it up did a good job, but they must have run out of funds after fixing the inside of the house because the backyard / pool still look pretty beat up.
At any rate, I am happy to have a lot of photos to share here that will give you a much better idea of what the house was like. I've decided to do a "before and after" format. Here we go:
Here is the front of the house. It's been painted a lighter color which I like much better than the rusty red color that it used to be. There's a new garage door, too. I'm pretty sure there was a single front door (not double doors) when we lived in the house. The following three photos are from the more recent listing:
Looks like the tree was trimmed down a lot (and another tree removed) and the fence added in the front. They also took out some of the lawn and put in the lighter tile. I'm not sure why...personally, I think it looks weird next to the brick. I think it would have been better if they had put matching brick there, or removed the old brick and re-paved the whole area with the tile.
I feel like there was grass or gravel on this side of the driveway when we lived there, but I don't remember for sure. I just don't remember there being dirt there.
Here's a photo from the old listing that shows a view of the stairs in the front room. You can also see part of the "balcony". I'm pretty sure the wrought iron railing on the stairs and the balcony were black when we lived in the house and there was definitely orange shag carpet covering the steps (and the living room floor), but otherwise it looks the same (the walls were all one color too...looks like someone was in the process of painting maybe).
In this photo from the old listing, you can see that there was a window and sliding glass door on this wall of the living room, which is how I remember this room. You can see part of the balcony in this photo too:
Here are photos of the living room from the new listing. The balcony railing has been filled in with a wall, the sliding glass door has been replaced with a window, a new window was added next to the front door, and the fireplace has also been renovated. (I think the other window was also replaced with a different window...it looks smaller to me). Overall, I think the room looks really nice but I don't really like the fireplace. As long as they were renovating it, I think they could have made it look a lot nicer. The fireplace was actually larger when we lived in the house, and there was a mantel and decorative wood paneling above the mantel that went all the way up to the ceiling. (I probably wouldn't remember any of these details if I didn't have a few photos from the time we lived in the house where the fireplace can be seen in the background). I don't blame them for removing the paneling, but the new fireplace looks too small and just isn't very appealing, in my opinion:
This photo from the old listing shows the dining area of the kitchen. It looks a lot like I remember it, with large windows all around the walls and a sliding glass door to the backyard:
And here is the kitchen wall. The cabinets were not black and white when we lived there (they were probably dark brown, but I don't remember) and the countertops used to be white tile, but I think all the appliances and cabinets are in the same location (although the appliances are also different...we had a classic 1970s harvest gold dishwasher when we lived in the house!):
Here are photos of the kitchen from the recent listing. Obviously, there was a complete kitchen remodel with new cabinets, countertops, flooring, lighting, and appliances. But there are also a number of structural changes including adding a wall and moving the refrigerator to that wall, removing one of the windows on the wall with the sink, and extending the couter space on that wall. It also looks to me like the two windows that remain in the dining area were replaced with smaller windows that don't sit as close to the floor as the old windows. The sliding glass door has also been replaced with a newer one. Overall, it is much nicer. I think the renovation was well done and makes much better use of the space in this large room:
This is the downstairs hallway, which connects to the kitchen (this photo is from the older listing; there wasn't one in the new listing). On the right side of the hallway is the laundry room and a bedroom (it was Shellie's room when we lived there). On the left side is a bathroom and the master bedroom.
This is the downstairs hall bathroom before the house was renovated. Or at least...I think this is the downstairs bathroom. The bathrooms confused me a bit because the size and layout of this bathroom definitely look like the downstairs bathroom. In my memory, this was the only bathroom in the house with a tub...the other two bathrooms had showers. I know I definitely took baths in the downstairs bathroom, and I don't think I would have done that if there was a tub in the bathroom upstairs. However, in both the pre-renovation photos and the new photos, two of the bathrooms have a tub. A tub could have been added to the upstairs bathroom later, of course. What really makes me question which bathroom is which is that the other bathroom photo from before the renovation shows a tub with sliding frosted glass doors on it, and in my memory the downstairs bathroom tub had sliding frosted glass doors. However, the bathroom in that photo looks too small to be the downstairs bathroom. Of course I may be remembering wrong, but in my memory the downstairs bathroom was bigger than the upstairs one (and both the old and the new photos appear to back up my memory in this way...one bathroom looks a lot smaller than the other one). It's just that the tub with the sliding frosted glass doors is in the wrong bathroom...haha!! In the end, I decided to go with this photo being the downstairs bathroom because it is definitley bigger. It's possible that a tub with sliding frosted glass doors to match the downstairs tub could have replaced the shower in the upstairs bathroom at some point, but it
is highly unlikely that the downstairs bathroom got smaller and the upstairs one got bigger. As I said before, my memory could be completely wrong about the bathroom sizes, but I did check with Amy and she also remembers the downstairs bathroom being bigger and taking baths in that bathroom, not the upstairs one. So we'll go with this being the downstairs bathroom:
It looks a lot nicer now, doesn't it?:
This is the laundry room, which was across the hall from the bathroom. It's a nice big room...I would love to have a laundry room like this!:
Here's the laundry room after renovation:
This is the bedroom at the end of the hall, which was Shellie's room when we lived in the house:
This is the master bedroom, before renovation. The door to the master bathroom is in the left wall:
The master bedroom, post renovation:
Here's another photo of the master bedroom, from a different angle. The recent listing mentioned that the house had possible potential for a rental area because there was a bedroom with it's own bathroom and private entrance. Apparently this room was being used as a rental unit when this photo was taken, since there is a microwave, mini refrigerator, and other kitchen utensils on the cabinet in front of the window. The door in the wall leading to the outside is definitely a later addition...it wasn't there when we lived in the house (and clearly isn't there in the pre-renovation photo):
Here is the master bathroom. I don't remember the master bath at all from the time we lived in the house (other than that there was a master bath):
Now for the upstairs. This is the loft area that looked down onto the living room. We didn't call it the loft, we called it the "balcony room". We used this room as a family room...there was a television on the solid wall and we had a couch and some chairs facing the television that backed up to the railing (not right against the railing...I remember I could squeeze in between the back of the couch and the railing):
The loft after renovations:
In this photo, you can see that there is a bedroom right behind the loft. This is the room that Amy and I shared:
Here are photos of the room Amy and I shared. It really hasn't changed except for the carpet and wall color. I was short enough when we lived here that I had to climb on a stool or something else to look out the window!:
It looks like this room may have been used as the master bedroom and it is definitely a large bedroom. Look at all that floor space! I remember having plenty of room to spread out toys on the floor to play. We had twin beds that we put with the headboards against the wall with the window (each bed in a corner, with the window in between the two beds).
I remember this walk-in closet too...we played in there sometimes.
Here is a photo of the upstairs hallway, taken approximately from the doorway of the bedroom that Amy and I shared. The door on the right was to a smaller bedroom that my older brothers used, the door on the left is to the upstairs bathroom, and the door at the end of the hall was to the bedroom that Tim and Ben shared:
Here is the smaller bedroom, across from the bathroom. This room was mostly Hans's room, but Erick shared this room with him when he was home. Erick was living at college (BYU) when we moved into the house and I think he only lived in this house with us for a couple of summers. Curtis was on his mission when we moved into the house and for almost the entire time that we lived here. He returned from his mission shortly before we moved to Utah and I think he only lived in the house for a week or less:
The door in the corner is to a closet. When we moved into the house, this closet connected to the closet in Tim & Ben's bedroom (it was sort of L shaped) so we could walk back and forth from room to room by walking through the closet. We little kids thought this was so cool! But it was not particularly practical to share a closet with two rooms, so my dad built some shelves to put in the middle of the closet which created a barrier between the two parts of the closet and basically turned it into two smaller closets instead of one big one. Here are photos of the room after renovations; it looks so much better:
Here is the upstairs bathroom (I think!), before and after renovations:
This is the last bedroom, which is the one that Tim & Ben shared:
Now we'll move on to the backyard / side yard. This first photo is the side yard, on the living room and kitchen side of the house. When we lived in the house, this yard was all cement with red brick trim and it looked pretty nice. There were a few openings where trees were planted...we called them "chum" trees because the fruit that grew on them looked like cherries but tasted like plums. (We later learned that they were Chinese plum trees). I was sad to see that the "chum" trees are gone. The cement and red brick trim are a lot worse for the wear, too. In the newer photo, you can see that some of the cement and brick trim remains but some of it is gone:
Finally, here are photos of the pool. This is the last pre-renovation photo. It does look exactly how I remember it except that there's no water in the pool:
Here are the more recent photos of the pool / backyard. The pool still doesn't have water...I don't know if it needs repairs or what...and you can also see more areas where the concrete is missing, and there are areas of dirt. None of those dirt areas were there when we lived in the house...the entire backyard was concrete with red brick trim. Hopefully someone will be able to fix up the backyard at some point. It was really quite nice when we lived there:
The planter in the corner had some trees, rose bushes, and other shrubbery when we lived in the house. I remember having to drag a hose over there to water everything. I like that they have cactus in the planters now, although the trees and rose bushes looked nice too.
It's nice to have these extra photos of the house which show so much more than the photos we took while we lived there. I keep hoping that at some point I'll be able to find photos online of some of the other houses we lived in, too. If I do, I will do follow up posts for those houses too.
