Our house turns 73 years old this year and now we have a hint about the time frame it was move-in ready!
Last summer we had extensive wood rot repairs done on the exterior siding of our home. Several times during the process I would hear the hammers stop and get a knock on the door. "I've got some bad news." the foreman would say. The news always had to do with hidden water damage and usually around windows.
Here is an image (below) of the repairs in progress under the bathroom window. The mold and rot is seen down the vertical 2x4s on the outer edges. One afternoon at the end of a work day I was talking with the foreman about how we had discovered the house has zero insulation in the walls. He then says "Well, there was some "insulation" in the bathroom wall that the original builder had used to place the toilet paper dispenser."
He was talking about newspaper. He said "Yeah, It's from 1950. I put it in the back of my truck with the rest of the debris. What? You want it?!"
Um, yeah!
Here is the back side of the toilet paper dispenser. I like that a bit of the newspaper is still attached and it's a graphic of lumber!
And for the complete look, here is the business side of the dispenser (bathroom tour and decor here):
So it turned out to be a wad of newspapers with dates of Friday Oct 6, 1950 and Wednesday Oct 11, 1950 (which fall on the same days of the week this year). Since fixtures such as this are some of the last finishing touches it only makes sense that the house was ready to be occupied by the end of October....making our home a Halloween baby!
I decided to do a little 73 year anniversary/birthday shindig based after an ad I came across in the garbled wall paper which boasted Domino Sugar:
I got us some sugar doughnuts as suggested by the Domino Sugar Fairy and served them on our vintage 1950 calendar plate:
Finding this newspaper in the wall was like discovering some ancient lost artifact to me. So exciting! We always wonder about the previous owners and what the house was decorated like over the decades. Before we bought it, past owners had done a bunch of remodeling: opening up rooms, removing walls, changing the flow of traffic, sheet-rocking the laundry room which I think used to be a garage, the space we use as a dining room was once a porch, the back foyer that leads to the deck I believe was once the dining room with just a window. There's been alot of changes so finding a little' bit of original' was awesome.
Happy 73 years to our little grey cottage!
{P.S. We also have a ceramic soap holder on the other wall that just might have another wad of 1950s newspaper hidden away!}
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