The last couple of days I've been helping my dad do some renovations to their home. Today we were cutting into the floor of the second level to lay some plumbing for a new bathroom on that level.
The floor was hardwood/finished on top and base board underneath... but in between we found a newspaper separating the wood. We found parts of two separate newspapers... one was Des Moines Register from May 16th 1935 and the other was part of the local newspaper in town. Pretty cool stuff. We debated ripping the entire hardwood (top coat) up in the corner we were working in to get the whole edition but decided against it. But we took a good hour, hour and a half looking at the news of the time and advertisements, which were by far the best from the stuff we did manage to get out.
So that got me wondering. Have you ever found anything interesting hidden in the floors/walls/ceilings during a renovation/repair? And what was it?
The EXACT same thing happened to me when renovating an old house. Was originally built in 1895. Someone had added more square footage to the main level living space by making the rap around porch part of the living room. When we discovered this, we decided to move the walls back and have the original porch. When we took up the sub floor, we found the deck floor still there. When we took up the flooring, we found creosote soaked Des Moines Register and Tribune from June of 1933 being used as a moisture barrier between deck floor and U/L boards. Most was torn when we removed flooring....however, one page came up intact. It had some very interesting reading. Germany threatening the world they will take the part of Poland which was lost in WWI by blood if necessary. Houses to rent for $15 a month. A car salesman from San Francisco swearing that the new Buick would climb the Rockie Mountains based on tests done from the streets of San Francisco. Very, very interesting!
We left a newspaper from today's DMR and a picture of us in the wall.
Edit: Decided we are also going to leave more of a time capsule. Cell phone, 3.5" floppy disk, cd, dollar bill and some coins, maybe some other things... suggestions?