Christmas 1986

This is me and Katie on Christmas morning 1986. Almost thirty years ago. She was just two and a half. This would be our first Christmas in our new house on Shirley Avenue. We had recently moved there in the fall.

We lived in that house a little over ten years. We loved that house and it was easy to maintain. Had some great parties in that house too.

We spent a month doing some work on the house before we moved in. There was some really awful colored paneling everywhere throughout the house. I tore it all out and then we painted the walls mostly white before installing a lot of artwork. It was a lot of hard work because the panels were glued to the walls and then I had to scrape the excess glue off before painting the wall. It took us almost a month but we did not want to live with that paneling. I had all that paneling piled by the sidewalk for the trash trucks to pick up. 

A few years later I was talking with the guy across the street and he said something about me not liking the paneling in the house. It turned out he bought that house from the previous family when the older person alone in the house passed away and he installed all that paneling before he sold the house... to us. We didn't know we had bought it from him. He was so proud of that paneling and thought he made the house so much better and then he saw us come by before even moving in and throwing all of his hard work out on the street for the trashmen.