Chirp!:

    Saturday, December 08, 2012

    Renovation Discoveries

    One of the best things I think, about renovating, is uncovering stuff and finding things.

    No, i'm not talking about a 4yr old rusk behind the fridge ( please don't let me find anything gross that points at me as a bad housekeep ) .. but more the thing that have been covered by past owners, like newspapers under floorboards, trapdoors, bodies, booty.

    Or in my case, an old travel ticket under the original tiles in the front room:


    originalfrontroom750


    and sorry - that's the biggest pic I can find of the old mantle.
    Of course .. that dowdy room in time became this ..



    Front Room


    ( Yummy, yummy )


    So anyway, i'm assuming the tiler came to work via train and maybe one of the tiles was wonky so he propped it up? Or maybe it was just in his pocket from a previous trip, not sure.


    hbfotografic-linoandticket


    Can you read it?


    The way I read it is thus:
    The traveller took a Single First Class Ticket on the 14th December at 5.31pm on a train that started at Flinders St and travelled to Altona -> Blackburn -> Deer Park and terminated at Moorabbin OR Mt Waverley.


    Which, for those of you not in Melbs, is the most implausible trip ever .. weird.
    This is how it looks on a map:


    map


    So i'm sure i've read it wrong.  Maybe the digit thing chomped out of the tag means he STARTED in Deer park and got off in Moorabbin.  Now that would make much more sense. 


    -------------------------------------------


    My other find ( under the ticket ) is from today.  Impatiently, i've started chipping away at stuff just to see what lies beneath.  It seems my ugly kitchen tiles have been laid directly onto the floorboards ( which look a bit dry-rot-ish :/ ) .. but I know we had lino once as there's some dirty old remnants under the dishwasher.  So I washed some up, and it seems we had a camo lino with gold sparkles. 

    Spesh.


    Other than that, the finds in my houses haven't been that interesting.. there was the old mission brown and dusky pink wallpaper behind the built-in robe in my old house .. and the petrified cat whose eyes had turned to amber under the Collingwood house ( morbidly facsinating ) .. oh, and the tombs I dug up under the back garden here* ..


    * probably garden borders, not tombs, but, you never know..


    What have you uncovered when renovating or decorating old homes?  Anything interesting?
    Any bodies or booty?

    7 comments:

    LBA said...

    Actually .. I think I just worked it out.

    He went from Flinders -> Deer Park.

    Which means it must have been a stub in his pocket, as we're nowhere near Deer Park.

    Would love to date it, if there's any train-type aficionados reading..

    Stacey said...

    We've found lengths of barbed wire, a plough disk and assorted old bottles in the garden. Inside we've got the remnants of red and white flocked wallpaper in the master bedroom and strange breaks in the floorboards which suggest walls that no longer exist. Love the domestic history of old homes.

    LBA said...

    Your house is amazing Stacey .. my offer still stands to come kick in that hollow wall to see what's behind it ..I don't know how you can stand not knowing! ;)

    Christie said...

    Haven't found anything very interesting, although pulling out an old gas heater & finding an original & working fireplace was pretty cool.

    Adventures of a Crazy Mumma said...

    newspapers,we found a stack behind an original builtin we moved. Unfortunately they were too far gone to salvage any.(house 1) beautiful floor boards covered up with horrible peach carpet (house 2)

    Nicole Herrick said...

    OOoh you had me at tombs!!!

    Pam Bradford said...

    I suspect the ticket enabled him/her to travel from flinders street, on any one of those lines as far as those destinations. Possibly those stations would have been the last on each of those lines. Maybe. And I agree, he/she used the ticket to travel to Deer Park.

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