one thing that i love about the previous owners is that they were not afraid to leave their mark on this house. every time we've had to open a wall, or move something around, i've found some kind of token from them. sometime it's something that they left on purpose (like notes left inside of walls), and other times it's random pieces of paper stuck behind drawers or between cracks in the counter. when we did some work in the upstairs bathroom i found the box top from laundry soap for a wringer washer. i've found newspapers from 30 years ago. just last week i found i recipe for a jello mold, complete with bits of celery and crushed pinapple.

when we started removing the drywall in the kitchen, right away we noticed that there were some thing written on the wall. the more drywall that we removed, the more words we found.



here it said "howdy" across the bottom, and the word "sunshine" in a box at the top.



off to the right we found this clue as to who wrote these things. this is a stick figure with the name eric. someone added the note "witty" at the bottom. are people even described as being "witty" anymore?? one of the sons of the family that lived in the house before was named eric. i sent this picture to our neighbor who still sees the family, she promised to share the picture with eric next time she saw him.



on the other side of the wall we discovered song titles. here we have "help me rhonda", "surfin safari", and "california girls".



and if there was any uncertainty on who sang these songs, we uncovered have this giant "beach boys" next to it. it also says water skiing below that. pay no attention to that electrical mess at the bottom of the picture, we took care of that too....

it's fun to find these things when we work on the house. i can just imagine the previous family working on their kitchen some summer (1965?), with the beach boys playing on the radio, or maybe while listening to a record. mike and i talked about doing something similar on the new wall before installed the cabinets, but we just couldn't image any of the music that we listen to now still being recongnizable in 50 years :-)