Michigan Family Reunion - Michigan: A New Home and Two Old Homes

Chuck and Cheryl and the Old Home Place

Friday, June 20, 2025

We had a busy day ahead of us and weren’t sure if we could fit everything in.  This is Doug and Janis’s last day in Michigan, as they are driving back to Chicago tomorrow morning to spend a couple of days with Janis’s sister who lives in Chicago.

To start our day, we decided to take a hike near our rental house to see if we could find a place to get through all the foliage and get to the river.  We found a trail near the house and had a nice walk through the woods.  We’ll never know if the trail got to the river as we ran out of time and had to return to the house because we were meeting my cousin Cheryl, her husband Chuck, and their son Chris this morning to look at one of Chris’s homes.

We found a trail just past the Coloma town limit.  This area west of the town limit is called the Black Woods Sancturary and is a 20 acre nature preserve. 

Doug and Janis.

Before he retired, Chuck had a business building prefabricated homes and his son Chris has now taken over the business.  Chris has a model home near Coloma, so Doug, Janis, Val and I met them there for a tour.    Aunt Judy came along with Ann Marie’s daughter Jasmine and a friend of Jasmine’s also joined us.

When I thought of prefabricated homes, I had always thought of homes constructed like mobile homes, but these were completely different.  The homes are put together with prefabricated modules and can be custom designed to the buyer’s specifications.  The model home we looked at was very nice and I wouldn’t have minded living there myself.  If I remember correctly, it was about 3000 square feet with two stories and a basement.  The houses are built in modules with things like cabinets already installed.  There is still quite a bit of work to be done once the modules are in place, but it does cut the build time down quite a bit.  Seeing this home has certainly changed my idea of what a prefabricated home is.

After touring the model home, Chris took us nearby to where he is building a home for his own family.  Surprisingly, he is building from the ground up, it’s not a prefabricated home.  I asked him why and he said he has always built prefab homes and wanted to see what it was like to build one like this.  The construction is still in the foundation stage but it looks like it’s going to be a very nice home.

Chris had to get back to work and Judy was going off with Jasmine and her friend, so Cheryl and Chuck took Doug, Janis, Val and I out for lunch.  Lunch was very good and we lingered for quite a while talking; Cheryl and Chuck are very nice, and we encouraged them to come and visit us in California.  Thanks to them both for a great lunch.

We said goodbyes and even though it was mid-afternoon, we decided to drive up to Grand Rapids for a bit of nostalgia.  I was born in Lansing, Michigan while my dad was going to Michigan State University.  We lived in a trailer that was built by my dad and grandfather in my great grandfather’s barn.  When my dad graduated, he went to work for Lear, Inc. in Grand Rapids.  They bought a small house in Grand Rapids and we moved there in what was probably about 1950.  A year later my brother Doug was born.  In 1955 (I think) my parents decided to move and had a home built in a rural neighborhood just outside of Grand Rapids and we lived there until we moved to California in 1958.  That is the reason we’re visiting Grand Rapids; Doug and I wanted to revisit our old homes.

We decided to visit the last house we lived in first.  When we lived there, it was a neighborhood out in the country with nothing around it.  We had a creek running through the back of our property and beyond that there were open fields and woods.  We had a great time roaming around the area and playing in the creek.  The house looked pretty much the same, but the surrounding area was unrecognizable, it was completely built up and is now part of the city.  Although not unexpected, it had been 67 years since we lived there, it was still a bit of a shock.

Next, we drove to the first house we lived in, in Grand Rapids.  When we lived there it had been in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, and although it had filled in some since, it still looked much the same.  The house was much the same and even though it was much smaller than I remembered it, I recognized it right away.

It was getting late in the afternoon and time for us to head back to Coloma.  It had been fun to visit the “old home place” especially for Janis and Val to see where Doug and I had started our lives.  As I write this, I really regret that we didn’t take any pictures.  I’m not sure why not, but it never occurred to us.

It was nearly six when we got back to Coloma and we started to discuss what to do for dinner.  Since we’d had a late lunch, none of us were very hungry we decided to just have dessert.  We found a great ice cream place in Coloma and had a great “dinner”.

Since they are leaving tomorrow, Doug and Janis spent the evening packing everything up and getting ready to go.  Val and I weren’t sure what we are going to do tomorrow.  We were supposed to go see my cousin Mike play somewhere, but we found out today that is was actually Sunday he was performing so I think we’ll spend tomorrow with Aunt Judy.