Literary Insulation
Dec/21/07 11:39 PM
One of the best things about renovating an old house is all the nifty things that you find while ripping out the walls and cleaning out the crawl-spaces. It is essentially like treasure hunting. Sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time you come up empty handed. However, yesterday (although I wouldn’t call it LUCKY) my builder told me I had to rip out the ceiling of the bedroom because the ceiling joists needed to be replaced.
Well, being Christmas and all, my mother was visiting so I did what any loving son would do... I enlisted her to help me rip out the ceiling. While ripping down the lath we noticed, what looked like magazine pages fluttering down from the ceiling. Turns out it was a small stack of magazines tucked away amongst the rafters. Upon further inspection we noticed that all the issues were dated the same year that the house was built. They were issues of the Saturday Evening Post from 1925. While they were entertaining to read, the real find was the name on the address label (Randomly pasted over the “os” in Post). Delivered to a Mrs. R. F. Bell. A virtual gold-mine since we’ve had no luck in tracking down any previous owners other than the person we bought it from.
The date on the earliest magazine that I found was (the one pictured above) February 21, 1925. And from what I understand, our house was recorded as being built in 1925, but does this mean that our house was built in January or February? The latest magazine was September 5, 1925, so it makes me wonder what the significance of the dates are or how the magazines even got there. Anyway...
Call me crazy, but I plan on cleaning them off and putting them in a zip-lock along with a current copy of the architectural plans and placing them back in the ceiling once we finish out the room. And maybe someone (In 82 years) will find them and think the same thing I did... Wow!
I will be posting this under the Items I’ve Found section of our website shortly. Get a Hi-Res image of the cover here.