What’s Inside Your Walls?

If you were to walk into my house and start tearing walls apart—and please don’t—you would find all kinds of interesting items inside the walls.

I constructed my own house in 1991.  Working weekends and every evening after finishing my day job, with the help of friends, I brought my home from the ground up.  Early into construction, I and some of my friends began signing our names to pieces of lumber as we nailed them in place.  Occasionally, an empty Copenhagen smokeless tobacco can, or some other trinket would be fixed to a wall stud or roof truss. 

When my wife’s birthday came in June of 1991, we were rolling roof trusses into place.  A bunch of us signed a “happy birthday” truss before we lifted it from the ground and nailed it into place.

Prior to drywalling the house, I placed a host of items in the hollows of some walls: photographs, notes, a few coins.

Yesterday, a local window shop replaced the three windows in the living room bay.  As the two installers pried the old windows from the rough openings and scraped away the insulating foam, writing on the wood framing began to appear.

The writing was from twenty-five years ago.  Almost to the exact date.  I remember the day.  My sister Debbie and her friend Cheryl were wandering around the place, half-drunk.  Cheryl, if memory serves, had mistakenly applied Heet liniment, instead of deodorant, to her underarms.  The girls wandered around the construction site, giggling, Cheryl flapping her overheated arms.  After watching the girls wander through the mostly skeleton house for a while, I found a pen and suggested that they write a few things on the bay window framing.

Yesterday, the writing emerged.

I am posting two photographs I captured of the writing.  Before the two installers covered the writing again, I urged them to sign their names and date on the framing for the next opening. 

--Mitchell Hegman