Bones, Bullets, and 17 Bags of Poo Later...

See that?

Actually, you probably can't; it's a terrible picture. But that is the crawlspace under the back porch stairs of The Box House. After three weekends worth of effort and 17 bags of cat poo later, I'm gonna declare it cleanish.

In addition to a few scattered bones, we did find an assortment of treasures in the crawlspace that, had they been from a more recent era, I would have called junk and simply tossed away. But their very age indicates they probably belonged to the original owners, and as such, are a tangible connection to the early history of the house.

There are a few bottles, one of red nail polish with a bakelite cap, another that once held pickles from Marshall Fields, and one that contained some kind of "oil". There's a child's toy tea cup; several glass marbles; an old metal flashlight; a bit of carved gesso and gold-painted wood, perhaps from a mirror; an old bullet; what might be a lamp from a 1920s car; a lead figure, sadly, without his head; numerous fuses; and a finial in the shape of an acorn are among the more notable treasures.

I plan to tuck them all into a box and keep them somewhere on the property; maybe I'll even tuck a note inside about how we found them, and bury or hide the box for a later owner to find.

The next step in dealing with this open dirt crawlspace is to create a vapor barrier; I'm not quite sure how we'll go about it yet, with all the wood framing. But before we do anything, I'm going to take a metal detector back there to see if there's anything else of interest we might have missed.

What cool things have you found in your old house?