This 91-Year-Old Lady's Home Looks Normal From the Outside – The Inside Will Blow You Away

A turquoise kitchen and a pink bathroom

Dorothy's kitchen is turquoise. The steel cabinets are turquoise, the built-in wall oven is turquoise, and so is the cooktop set into the white counter. The counters have a pattern of little grey boomerangs. In the corner stands a chrome-edged dinette table with four turquoise vinyl chairs, where Earl read the paper every morning for almost fifty years. The oven still works. Dorothy baked Earl's birthday cake in it every year, and this June she baked one in it for her own birthday.

Only one thing in the kitchen is not original: the refrigerator. The old one died in 1988, and Dorothy is still a little cross about it. "That one lasted 26 years," she says. "This one is already acting up." Her aprons hang on a hook by the back door, and her recipe box sits on the counter, full of cards in her mother's handwriting.

Down the hall is the bathroom, and it is pink. Pink tiles cover the walls up to the shoulder, with a thin band of dark red tiles along the top. The tub, sink, and toilet are pink. Millions of bathrooms like this were built in the 1950s and 1960s, and most have been ripped out since. Tyler told Dorothy that some buyers now look for exactly this. "People pay extra for pink?" she said. "Earl would laugh." But Earl's favorite room is downstairs. See it on the next page.