My cousin Leora was doing a bit of renovation in her Chicago bungalow and found that a previous owner had done some wood paneling – until now, covered by a newer wall – in deconstructed Bull Durham tobacco crates. Does anyone know if these are especially collectible to anyone?
What interesting objects or spaces have you found when remodeling or otherwise repairing your home?
Working on our 1914 Denver bungalow, we came across a few wadded up newspapers and some brown papers. Carefully un-wadding them revealed what must have been the flooring guys lunches 96 years ago – apple peels, orange peels, bratwurst ‘skins’, tobacco stamps and even some left over grease stains. Kinda gross, sure, but very telling. And the newspapers revealed that the building permit for our house (that reads 1912) wasn’t quite accurate. The floors went in in April 1914.
I work for the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau and Durham NC is where Bull Durham was originated. In fact, the original Old Bull Building, a National Historic Landmark has just been redone as condos and office space. Let me check with some people who do a lot of collecting of this type of thing and get back to you.
Being a plumber by trade , I have been in hundreds of houses in the area. My father used to call these crate houses. I have seen many such items like these from under and above, when installing drains and vents.
The use of crates and such is common in the midwest on old houses.
I have found guns, whiskey bottles, coins, old news papers were also used as insulation under attic floors from long ago.
Every old house has some thing somewhere. I do like wise I always leave some thing behind.
I always sign my wood work and date these with day weather and so forth.
Some places were so removed in deep crawl spaces , i would leave note to who it may concern.
Feeling sorry for them , having to be in such a place.
I’m with Runde516: after remodelling my second house, I’ve taken to leaving messages to people who will come along in future and rip out the walls I’ve so painstakingly replaced.
In the first house, I found old newspapers, bobs and bits of old books, bottles that used to contain everything from beer to rat poison, costume jewelry, somebody’s name scrawled on a beam, and an entire racoon skeleton (yow!). In this house, nothing much besides dehydrated mouse carcasses and old razor blades–except, in the kitchen, somebody signed and dated a wall joist in the kitchen when they were building the house.
When I redid this bathroom, I left an empty beer bottle with a message in it inside the wall. It detailed what we’d found before, who was doing the renovation, the date, and our signatures.
I’ve never found anything interesting in my house, but when I was a kid the neighbors found the wall where the original owners marked their childrens heights and ages. The house was over a hundred years old. The neighbors decided to leave that one patch unpainted and add their own kids measurements next to it.
do you still have those crate boxes? i live in durham and would be interested in them.
mwrynn@hotmail.com