Mysteries

The question we've been asked most often is, "did you find anything interesting when you ripped out the walls?" We live in an older neighborhood. Most of the houses we're built in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it is common to find "insulation" of building scraps and newspapers. 

Our "insulation" looked like this: 

It's hard to tell from the picture, but it has the same weight and drape of medical gauze, but wider, and it's hard to imagine that it had any role at all in keeping our house warm or quiet. Also, as you can see, it was badly deteriorated.  We found no building scraps, new newspapers, no lost toys or jewelry. It was all rather boring.

Except. 

There must have been a fire. 

When we removed the cabinets, this is what it looked like. 

The yellow/orange squares are the remnants of the adhesive of tin backsplash (which we painstakingly popped off one at a time). So best as we we could figure, the charcoal colored wisps were smoke damage.