The declaration of remodeling by prior owners.
When the kitchen and bathroom walls were demolished, we found artifacts of their prior remodeling periods. The previous owners had a terrific sense of style. Their construction skills were not as strong, but they deliberately left clues for the archeologists that would follow (that’s me) to enjoy. I described one such encounter with hidden artifacts in an earlier post.
Buried in the upstairs kitchen walls was an envelope, clearly intended for a future discoverer. I expected a set of plans or some other arcane set of detailed information or specifications. Instead, I get to page through a copy of Minneapolis City Pages from 1986, and a Life magazine from 1985.
City Pages 1986
Brooke Shields, highlighed in Life Magazine, 1985
Unfortunately, I’m old enough to remember these issues! This is not the time-capsule experience that the originators intended I’m sure. Even so, it is a pleasant surprise to encounter them.
There were other discoveries. In one wall newspapers were stashed that relayed news of the major earthquake that had just happened in California (1989). Handwritten messages clearly indicated the dates that the remodeling construction was happening.
October 18, 1989
In yet another location, a plaque declaring an even earlier remodeling effort was discovered. This one marks an event that happened more than fifty years back, halfway between original construction and now. I will need to do a little more research to learn what it refers to; it could be the conversion from store to duplex, maybe when the mansard roof was added as an architectural feature.
The wooden testament from a remodeling project in 1959, exactly 53 years earlier to the day of this posting.
I wonder what I should leave behind. I have some old copies of newspapers I have collected over the years. Would it be too confusing for someone thirty or forty years hence to encounter newspapers showing the moon landing, inside construction whose city permits were issued in 2012? No, that would just encourage the moon landing conspiracy nuts.
Still, it is an opportunity for the next time capsule. What would YOU embed in the new walls?
Excellent! Maybe just add to the collection??? How about a CD/USB with this blog (wonder if that media will still be readable in 30+ years)? Maybe you sohould just print it.
Yes, you should print the blogs and make a “booklet”, (maybe explaining about “booklets”!) Oddly, books may be more accessable in the future since today’s CD/USB/Kindle technologies may be unreadable, having morphed into something else, or been replaced by completely different technologies. Imagine how disappointed you would have been, Thor, if you had found some of those first truly soft 8″ floppy disks…even a videotape would be hard to access in a few more years.
Dave beat me to my reply. If only you could purchase enough Hollerith cards… You could build a whole house out of them with all the data content. So lets see cards are 7&3/8″ by 3&3/4″ by 0.007″ (143/inch) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card. At 80 characters per card… you could pack half again but what the heck. Anyway I think that the 1959 photo above is 50KB and that is about 625 cards. At 143 cards per inch that is about 4.37 inches of cards. Don’t drop that deck – because you didn’t leave any room for sequence number! That old building would probably allow you to put the 3&3/4 between the real 2×4’s of the outer walls.
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