Not Our Dream Homes

This is my answer to the daily prompt: Write about your dream home.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

Ok, so the following are not our dream homes, but they are homes we’ve lived in all the same and recently, while visiting my childhood hometown, I gave myself a little project to drive around and photograph every house in which Dean and I had lived.

There were six in total and here they are.

House No 1 – 192 Boundry Street

This is the house we lived in after we were married almost 38 years ago. Back then it was a neglected rental property with chicken wire fencing and no plants or shade in sight anywhere.

It’s easy to see that the current owner loves this house.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

House No 2 – 5 Bloom Court

This is another rental and it never looked like this when we lived in it. There were huge trees providing shade, a vacant allotment at the rear, and the carport wasn’t built in like it is now.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

House No 3 – 1 Mundy Court

We were struggling financially and were very pleased to be assigned a house by the housing commission. It meant cheaper rent based on our income. This was a new home when we moved in and we planted all the grass and that huge tree on the left.

We moved out when I went back to work and that cheaper rent increased to an unreasonable amount.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

House No 4 – 39 Mill Drive

My mother and brother lived here with us for a while. There was no carport and I don’t remember the fencing looking like that. Also – we kept the grass trimmed short.

When my mother and brother moved out, we couldn’t afford the rent by ourselves, so we looked for a cheaper rental property, and moved again.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

House No 5 – 28 Yut Fay Avenue

I don’t remember this house looking this good, but it has a huge backyard – big enough for a trampoline from which Kate broke her arm doing a backward summersault with a 1½ twist in the pike position.

That wasn’t the end of the trampoline, but it was the end of her gymnastic stunts.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

House No 6 – 2 Elisa Street

Of all the houses I visited, this was the saddest and it made me sigh. This was the first home we owned.

This was ours, the one we put all our money into, the house we turned into a real home and we loved it.

It had a coved entertaining area out the back with an attached greenhouse that had a little bridge over a pond. It had two separate greenhouses on either side that blocked the backyard from the front and when our loan was approved, we were the customers who took the bank’s lending over a specified level for the year and were rewarded with a ‘face-lift’ – more than $5,000 of landscaping (in the front yard), a garage door (because there wasn’t one) and a few other little bit and pieces that jazzed up the street appeal of our home – paint, potted plants, and latticework come to mind.

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

So these were the houses Dean and I lived in before July 1993 when we moved to the southeast corner of Queensland.

But there was one other dwelling we shared.

2/5 Mcintosh Street

We lived in this little flat for 12 months before we got married and moved into the house on Boundry Street (listed as House No 1).

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

There was something about visiting these houses while I was in Townsville in January.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think doing so made me sad.

Sad for what I’m not sure, but perhaps I was melancholy for another time in my life.

---

I also photographed the houses I lived in before I met Dean – I’ve saved them for another day.