Things Found In Houses
People leave a house but they don’t vacate it entirely. Things get left behind, some presumably for the amusement and mystique of the new owners.
Other items are abandoned in an uncomplicated fashion. I love finding artifacts, despite not being much of a history buff and not being overly sentimental as an overall rule. One of these times I’ll find a treasure chest, but in the meantime, I’ll find contentment and wonderment at the relics from the past in people’s walls, attics, nooks and crannies.
The coolest artifact so far is a metal box full of old pictures and newspaper clippings, stashed behind some drawers in some kitchen cabinets I was tearing out. Naturally being so well- hidden lead me to believe I'd found a box of cash and jewelry. No such luck, but the box indeed shared a rich history. There were pictures of the house itself, dated in the 1970’s, vintage light pouring through from a golden hour some summer afternoon 50 years back, trees long since cut down and dark brown paint long since covered over with vinyl siding. Other pictures had names handwritten on their backs, including the name Mihay, familiar to most in Columbus. I reached out to Mr. Mihay at Columbus North who, ironically enough, was a teacher of my son at the time. The uncle shown in the picture had died just weeks before, and a small circle of small town history was closed.
In the kitchen walls of the same house I found dozens of magazines, books, and an M&M's wrapper from the 1940’s. The old books had handwritten names in the front cover and jokes and poems written by a student of those times. Presumably they had been dropped down into the stud spaces from the attic above, suggesting that at one time, the attic was a place where teenagers congregated and for whatever reason, sent items down into the kitchen walls for me to find.
Under some carpet extracted from an appalling bathroom (who carpets bathrooms, anyways?) I found a Hustler Magazine from the 1970’s. I won't speculate as to why it had been hidden there.
Another house, a rental prior to our acquisition of the title, offered a different type of object altogether. The tenants were, according to the neighbors, “not very driven individuals.” A young couple with a young child, there were many indications of parental disengagement. Crayon scribble was found on the walls and even on the outside of the house. During their tenancy, windows were covered with blankets and they didn’t leave the house very often. While installing insulation in the attic, I found a used hypodermic needle and a spoon used to melt heroin crystals, artifacts that suggests an uncertain future for the young child, who I’m told was not speaking at age three. If the box of pictures left me feeling nostalgic, this discovery left me feeling depressed and, admittedly, a little violated.
The first flip project we undertook had a house full of children. With three bedrooms for five kids, it's easy to picture the girls sharing secrets in one and the boys doing whatever boys do in the other. As I was painting the closet walls in what must have been the girls’ bedroom I found the words “Anne likes David” written in pencil in a teenage hand. She was the main family member I had been communicating with through the purchase of the home and I couldn’t resist taking a picture and sending it to her. We both had a good chuckle.
In the basement of that same house I found the shoe of a small girl who had to have dated back to the 40’s. Something about the shoe gave my oldest son, Avery, the creeps. Seeing an opportunity, I started to stage the shoe in various locations where he would find it. “Avery, would you look in that cabinet and see if I set my screwdriver in there?” He’d open the cabinet, see the shoe, and scream like the ghost of the little girl to whom the shoe belonged so long ago. Naturally I kept the shoe and have given it to him, wrapped in a Christmas or birthday box, several times since. Each time, he reacts with alarm, usually throwing the shoe back, for me to save for the next time.
My favorite discovery, though, is my favorite for the symbolism I don’t usually ascribe to objects. They were discovered in the attic of the roughest house we have owned, in the least desirable location. By far, it required the most full-scale renovation and the most hours of sweat equity of any property we’ve undertaken. My dad, a little melodramatic as a rule, likes to refer to it as “The House from Hell." But what I found up there, in a truly hellish attic where I spent far too many hours, was a Monopoly $1 bill, alongside a Monopoly property deed.
What property? Park Place. This was the universe’s way of reminding me of the three rules of real estate: location, location, location. Message received. The next three houses we bought were lake properties.
The time capsules people leave behind in a house don’t tell us stories so much as they provide the raw material for us to project our own stories onto them. That’s what makes them great. It’s like a novel where the author leaves gaps for our own imaginations to patch in. Who knows if the residents are trying to tell a story or if the objects were forgotten, carelessly discarded, or lost. It doesn’t matter.
For our part, though, leaving an unfinished story will always be carried out with intent. In a bathroom renovation we did many years ago, each of our family members left an object in a wall cavity. Me: a concert ticket stub. Megan: a toy dragonfly. Avery: a lacrosse ball. Adler: a baseball. Michael: a Lego figurine. Whoever finds it will pause for a moment in their demolition and smile, maybe pocketing the items, or maybe throwing it on the trash trailer. Either way is fine; it’s not my story to tell.