Found & Lost: Newspapers

Years ago, when I took up the carpet in the living room, I found two or three layers of linoleum (depending on which part of the room you were standing in) and underneath that lino, I found newspapers. There was a Russian-language newspaper from New York, along with English-language NYC papers, dating back to 1936. One of the pages featured a map that detailed Hitler's plans for the Anschluss (annexation of Austria). The papers were in very brittle condition and yellowed.

With this renovation, we have found newspapers from the 1970s in the kitchen with ads for a brand new VW bug. A lot of the walls have scrunched-up newspaper in them, for insulation.

And in the bathroom, they used bunched-up newspapers to insulate around the window. My builder, Lonnie, found a newspaper announcing "Kennedy elected," which would date the installation of the window back to 1960. Unfortunately the newspaper disintegrated as he was trying to straighten it out to read it.

We also found out that the bathroom had been painted in two different shades of Pepto-bismol pink. No doubt my sister, Renee (who has a beautiful pink bathroom in her house), would approve.