Old House Treasures

Over the weekend, since Sam had a couple of extra days off, he decided to investigate some electrical wiring in the house. We know that there is old wiring in the house, but figuring out where and how the wiring was done is a whole, somewhat scary, investigative process, particularly as it's difficult to access a lot of the electrical.

Anyway, while he had the time to do some investigating and I was occupied taking care of some things in the kitchen renovation, it seemed like as good a time as any to start the process. As Sam paced back and forth from upstairs to the main level and down to the basement, I could see his mind attempting to piece together how exactly things were coming together electrically. 

Ultimately, he decided that he needed to cut a hole in one of the walls in a room upstairs to attempt to find out if his presumptions were accurate. When he did so, he found some unanticipated treasures left behind over the years. Nothing was particularly special or valuable, but it was kind of fun to see some items that dated back to the mid-1930s to early 1940s.

One of the kind of sad things was finding some bird eggs (we assume pigeon) that had been long-abandoned. If you look closely in the photo above, you can see them lying in the straw/hay toward the roof line. 

There was also a tin coffee can that I believed to be newer than it turned out to be.

Obviously, not in great shape, but it's kind of fun to find these old items. In addition to the coffee tin, there were a variety of papers found - newspaper clippings, an envelope, some candy wrappers, etc.

There was also a hand-printed start to a note in which what appeared to be a child was writing to ask how his dad and mom were doing (no photo attached, as I didn't snap one). 

Of a bit of interest to me was that the envelope found that has The Buckley Lumber Company as the return address in Durango, Colorado, appeared to be out of business by the time this house was built. I found a digitized National Lumberman book that laid out all of the US lumber mills and it stated that as of 1910 The Buckley Lumber Co was out of business. I couldn't help but wonder if the builders of this house had some kind of connection to Durango, as it seems a bit odd to have an envelope from a company that would've been out of business for about 25 years when this house was built.

What is also of interest to me is that these items above would not have been found at all if Sam hadn't felt the need to figure out the electrical (which is definitely a must) because they were all walled up, never to be seen again. A bit of a time capsule of sorts. I'd guess it also means that the upper area was perhaps finished earlier than we had thought, but who can really know for certain?

We're hoping to have an update to post on the kitchen relatively soon, but more than likely it will be at least a couple of weeks... but, we're getting there and looking forward to having a functional kitchen again in the near future.