Living in Ravensdale, Washington

This was rural Washington. Logging and mining country. Long before Maple Valley became what it is today, before the shopping centers and subdivisions and all the conveniences we barely think twice about now.

And in this little corner of the Pacific Northwest, an Italian family was building a life.

The Collecchi family had already established roots in the area by the 1930s, and in 1947, Julie Collecchi was born in Ravensdale. She grew up with several siblings in a tiny 1922 house on SE 271st Street.

I can only imagine what life looked like inside that house then. A big Italian family somehow fitting into a very small home, in a rural community where the people next door weren’t just neighbors. They were part of your world.

And in Julie’s case, the boy next door would eventually become her husband.

Bob Benedetti’s family lived on the neighboring property. Julie and Bob grew up, fell in love and married in 1967. And then they did something that, looking back now, feels like the most Ravensdale thing imaginable:

They built their own home right between the two family homes.

They didn’t go searching for somewhere new to put down roots. They built right into the ones that were already there.

And they stayed.

Decades later, that’s where my Ravensdale story enters theirs.

I started dating their son John when I was around 18. A couple of years later, when I was about 20 or 21, Julie’s childhood home was sitting empty. The offer was basically this: if I wanted to remodel it, I could live there for a year rent-free.

And by “if I wanted to remodel it,” what that really meant was my stepdad and I were about to find out exactly what was hiding inside a house built in 1922.

Nothing was straight.

When we started taking the walls apart to level things out, we found old newspapers stuffed inside them as insulation. We added a bathroom. We redid the kitchen. We fixed what we could.

I never touched the basement. Some things in a nearly 80-year-old house are better left undiscovered. 😂

Then there was the tiny room I used as my closet. And when I say tiny, I mean tiny. I could barely fit my own stuff in there.

Then someone told me that had been Julie’s bedroom growing up.

Wait. Her bedroom?!

Here I was trying to figure out how one person was supposed to fit her clothes in there, while Julie had grown up in this little house with what I believe were five siblings.

At 20 or 21, I don’t think I had enough life behind me to understand how incredible all of this actually was. I was young. I was fixing up an old house. I was getting a year of free rent. It was an adventure.

Now I see something completely different.

I see Julie’s childhood home on one side. Bob’s family home on the other. And the home they built together sitting between them.

Three homes. Generations of one family story. All right there.

And for one little chapter of my own life, I got to live inside the house where that story began.

I think about those newspapers we found inside the walls. I think about Julie in that impossibly small bedroom. I think about how many people had eaten dinner in that kitchen before I ever remodeled it.

And maybe that’s part of why old homes have always meant something different to me. They’re not just square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms and resale value.

They’re layers.

Someone chose that land. Someone built those walls. Families grew up there. Kids fell in love with the kid next door. New homes were built. Generations stayed. And eventually some 20-year-old girl came along, tore into the walls and discovered newspapers from another lifetime hiding inside them.

For a year, I got to add my own little layer.

And all these years later, when I think about Ravensdale, that’s what I remember most: