The things under the stairs

I haven't posted anything about my house in a long, long time. Well, I guess I should throw something up here about that. The below picture will show you that I have cleared out the area below my stairs and now have an open view to my basement. My eventual goal here is to have access to the basement through a hatch type thing once I change to a floating staircase and lay hardwoods (or some form of fake hardwood). I think I may have found the stairs I want, and they really aren't that expensive ... but I want to finish some of the other work before I decide to tear out my current stairs.



While clearing out the wall under the stairs, I found a treasure trove and random crap from half a century ago. Everything was just scattered around (with a lot of nasty dirt and dust) in the area under the first couple steps. Well, not everything ... some of it was actually IN the walls.



Here are some of the highlight of what I found:



There were a few more of those playing cards, I think maybe 5 in total. There were a ton of prayer cards from different funerals, but I thought the most interesting one was for a priest that spent a large portion of his time in Japan. The prayer cards were mostly in very good shape. The card with planes on them are part of a set of 144 or something, but they are pretty beat up. The metal thing in the middle is a dog license from the 1950's and will go great with the other stuff I've found in walls from the 50's when I frame them in a shadow box. Probably the most interesting thing though is a Buck Rodgers card from 1936. Like the plane cards, it's in pretty bad shape ... but it's from 1936! Who cares what kind of shape it's in, it's older than my parents.



I guess I'll leave you with a picture of my living room with most of the sub floor put down (ignore all the crap, I took the picture on a whim and didn't feel like cleaning up).