2024: The Year of Cleaning Out & Selling My Childhood Home

In May 1974, my parents purchased a 700-square-foot house for $32,500, and 50 years later on November 18th, 2024, I sold it for 10 times the amount they paid. (Side note—a young couple bought it as their first home. I love that it’s a similar story as my parents’ story. They already made some changes, and we love seeing what they are doing with it!). 

The house was old, but not in a charming kind of way, more like a neglected kind of way. There were very few full renovations over the years, just a few cosmetic updates. When my parents moved in, they laid carpet in the 2 main floor bedrooms. A few years later, they changed out the army green carpet in the living room. The 1980s brought a renovation to the army green kitchen and pink bathroom. Next was covering the living room walls in wood paneling. Then finishing the basement to create another bedroom, as my sister (13 at the time) and I (7 at the time) shared our tiny bedroom with a trundle bed that we had to pull out every night and put away every morning until 1985. 

The house probably needed another renovation when the 21st century began, but by then my parents were in their late 50s and we were out of the house. My dad focused on other updates, like putting in permanent air conditioning units and a whole house generator. 

After I cleaned out the 50 years of our clutter and turned over the keys, the new owners immediately pulled up the decades old carpets splotched with grime and cigarette ash, refinished the original wood floors and slapped fresh paint over the smoke-stained wood paneling. It’s already a brand-new home. 

The memories, the trauma, the ghosts will no longer bleed through. Let me be clear: I was not sad to sell the house. It was a thorn in my side. No more accounts to keep track of and no more worry about an empty house across the country. 

Doesn’t mean that I didn’t need to process cleaning out and selling my childhood home this last year. This is the home that housed my adolescence—all the frustrations, angst, fears, shame, bitterness, jealousy, low self esteem. It’s the home where I discovered my love for reading, wrote my first “novel” about being a raisin, and fired up my fascination of all things wild by exploring the tiny swath of woods in my backyard. It’s the home where 3 cats and 1 hamster died, where I split my lip open in the front yard and sprained my pinkie (separate occasions), fought with my sister, fought with my mom, fought with my dad, tried every type of dance, learned I was a terrible swim team member, a mediocre track star, a decent cheerleader and a B-team field hockey player, struggled to make honor roll throughout school, fell in love, cried over heartbreak, got married. 

I won’t miss the fact that I grew up with 4 people and one bathroom. If you were in the shower, and someone turned on the water in the kitchen, the shower water would turn cold and you’d have to yell, “I’m in the shower!” I won’t miss things like the water softener, which made it hard to get shampoo out of your hair and soap off your body. The actual softener in the basement would do something at 2am that sounded like a screaming cat. I won’t miss the rickety wooden stairs to the attic, which stored all my mom’s millions of decorations for every holiday conceivable. When they were pulled down, the bathroom door was blocked. There were so many quirky nuances to that home, especially after 50 years. 

In the same breath, I do glorify features like the spiral staircase to the basement, dubbed the death stairs by neighbors. They were so fun to Janice & I! Then there was the circular stone wall surrounding a tree at the corner of our property that marked my youth as a place to climb, play and a bus stop (though sadly, we had to take it down sometime in the 1990s). Also I will forever love lilac bushes. When my mom saw the lilacs blooming in the front yard in 1974, she knew she wanted that house, and despite her black thumb, it stayed strong through the years. 

Life certainly grew beyond playing Ghosts in the Graveyard and Red Rover with all the neighborhood kids, but time stumbles when you walk through your past—both the memories and trauma. And I’m not trying to romanticize the hard bits, because unearthing your youth and meditating upon old stuff certainly triggers traumas from what seems like a lifetime ago. But now it’s over. The house is sold and I’ve moved on. I think if I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I will always be able to smell of dust and smoke from 92 Mansel Drive.