Liz Solo Demo Run

January 31, 2017

Tonight, we had a plan for “house night” on the calendar. We’ve been trying to be more consistent about when we work on the house, and having a few days during the work week helps us stay on task.

But our laundry situation had kind of reached a critical stage. So I opted to take all our clothes to the laundromat instead. Liz though, opted to keep to the “house night” schedule and did some work on her own.

I came home around 7:30PM, and on opening the door heard all sorts of banging and crashing from the basement. When I opened the door to the first floor bathroom (which also leads to the basement), I saw this:

Liz, perched atop a ladder, surrounded by lots of debris. Note where the ladder is placed – we couldn’t have done that before the big concrete pour last Saturday.

She was busy…

A series of old papers and things Liz found in the wall.

All those papers were in the wall, in an area behind where our pocket door sits.

My beautiful, hammer-wielding wife.

Some time later, at the kitchen table, Liz showed me one of the documents she found. It looked like a blank piece of yellow paper, but she opened it up… and it was amazing!

Note the soot smudging off her finger (top left), just by touching the thing.

It’s a bill for some plumbing/heating work done on the house – back in 1917! I’ve uploaded a larger image, if you want to view a higher res version of this.

The bill was given to the original owner of the house. We did some research, and $13.68 back then translates to about $258.38 (in 2016).

I’m not even sure where 5315 Lake Park Avenue really is, as it seems to map to a corner that currently has no buildings.

We shared this image with Bob, and he noted that the date was almost 100 years and 1 month exactly, from when this bill was written to when we discovered it. To have something this old in our house, and in our hands, was really quite something.

Also – there’s what I think is a phone number in the top left corner. Back when phone numbers were only four digits long!

We’ve found some interesting stuff in this house. An old set of keys, an old scorecard to a 1953 Cubs game. And now this.

Makes us feel like we should take some of our receipts, and just stuff them in the wall. You know, just so that someone 100 years from now has something they can find from us.