When you buy your childhood home, history conveys. Drama might, too.

When Christina Knowles’ mother was looking for a home in the Washington, D.C., area in 1980, she told the real estate agent to show her the house that no one else wanted.

“And this was the house,” Knowles said, standing in the midcentury-modern home of her childhood in Bethesda, Md., decades later.

It’s been more than 25 years since her mother lived here, but there are remnants of her throughout. Knowles hasn’t made any changes to the white “’80s kitchen,” as she describes it, where her mom loved to cook spaghetti Bolognese and osso buco. A large Dutch painting, her grandparents’ cheeky nod to her mother’s elopement, still hangs on the living room wall above the couch. Eagle-eyed guests will notice pieces of a champagne glass nestled on top of the wooden frame — whenever someone broke a glass, her mom would place it on the painting for good luck.

The house has undergone serious work since Knowles and her husband, Christopher Petite, bought it in 2000. They added windows throughout and painted over the dark wood. They dealt with rippling fiascoes: a sagging ceiling, a roof that rained asbestos down on them.

Those changes have made the space a home that feels like theirs. But that slices both ways. When Knowles’ father visited after her mother’s death and saw the building’s transformation, he didn’t take it well. “It’s so loaded,” she says. “It probably felt like we weren’t honoring her memory.” He never visited again.

Childhood homes loom large in our imagination. They’re the site of many of our earliest memories, good and bad; many of us can’t resist driving past when we’re back in our hometowns or stalking them on Zillow, wondering what they look like inside now. People who purchase their childhood homes might be attempting to pass along the best parts of their childhood to the next generation or are simply looking for a less spiky path to homeownership in a tough market. They’re living in their family history, uncovering old artifacts even as they add new layers.

A closet at Jenny Dersom’s house still has all of the markings where her family measured their heights as they grew up. “It’s sort of a time capsule of all of our childhood memories,” she said. Dersom and her husband had dreamed about eventually moving back to Bexley, Ohio, when they had kids.

While she hadn’t necessarily thought they’d be back in the same Cape Cod home where she was raised, “the fact that I had good memories growing up here, it made it that much more special.” She loved the neighborhood as a child. Now she sees her twin boys running around the same streets with a group of nearby kids, just as she had hoped.

That hasn’t quite been the experience for Sarah Despres, who lives in D.C. It’s not just the home that looks different since she grew up, but the neighborhood does, too. In the 1980s, the Mazza Gallerie, a fancy mall, had just been built. “To have a mall within walking distance as a teenager in the ’80s — does it get any better than that?” she said.

She, too, has memories of traipsing around the neighborhood with her sister and their friends, but it’s not quite like that anymore. The herds of free-range kids she recalls have disappeared. By the time her son was a teenager, Mazza Gallerie was a ghost town (it has since been demolished). The neighborhood has changed, and childhood has changed a bit, too.

Kim Dunlap spent years at her grandparents’ home in Red House, W. Va. Papaw and Mamaw’s house was a main gathering place for the family. Everyone would celebrate Christmas there; Dunlap has photos of her and her siblings as kids planting potatoes in the backyard. When she was in kindergarten, her home burned down, and her family moved in until it was rebuilt.

As her grandparents got older, they couldn’t maintain it and ultimately moved in with her mother. The house that once served as a central hub for the family fell into disrepair. Dunlap, who lived nearby with her husband, approached her grandfather to make an offer. She knew she was signing up for a major project, but she wanted to provide a similar fulcrum for the family, especially to host her mom. They purchased it in the summer of 2021 and got to work.

After tearing up ceilings and floors, Dunlap can’t even watch HGTV without getting stressed out. But it has been worth it, she says. The entire place has been transformed. And they managed to reuse some of the vestiges of what was there before. Old windows were employed to build a greenhouse. She sanded a wooden door she found with old birth dates and turned it into a headboard.

Despres’ home growing up reflected her parents’ minimalist tastes. Now, walls feature vibrant paint colors and textured wallpaper. When her parents visit, she takes some of the items off the dining room sideboard — maybe a picture frame or a metal statue — to avoid her mother’s accusations of amassing too much stuff. “My mother always comments on the clutter,” she says. Many parents have constructive criticism for their adult kids’ homes, but few can bring the authority that comes with once having held the deed to the property.

When Liz Craig was growing up in D.C., she didn’t expect to return to the city as an adult. When she and her husband purchased her parents’ D.C. home in 2000 for its appraisal price, no bidding war required, at first she wondered if she was making a mistake. Was it “lame,” she wondered, to end up where she started?

“At first, it was very important to me to decorate the house differently,” she says. “I did try to, you know, change things around. And then I realized, it actually is better the way that my parents did it.”

But these days, she doesn’t think about it as her childhood home as much as her adult home. After all, she has lived in it longer as an adult than she did growing up.

That’s how Knowles feels, too. What was once her childhood bedroom is now a guest room and office. A pile of her folders and binders sat on the bed on the day I visited. She said she mostly doesn’t think about how she slept in the room as a kid when she does her adult work there. “We live different lives within our life,” she said.

But sometimes, a reminder of a previous life beckons from inside a wall or behind a shelf.

Knowles found love notes that her parents wrote to one another on the shelves where they stored Christmas decorations. She’s pretty sure she had known at one point about those adoring scribbles. “It was the kind of thing that you kind of forget,” she said. “And after they're gone and I was back there, I was like, oh wow, that’s so sweet.”

She and her husband believe that whoever buys the quirky home from them will probably tear it down to build something bigger and newer, a pattern they’ve seen over and over in their neighborhood. Knowles plans to rip out those shelves when they someday move — those are staying in the family.