It's in the cards

You never know what you'll find when you buy a house!

A friend of mine bought a house in the city to use as a business. One of the rooms had that cheesy 70's fake wood paneling which was actually fiberboard covered with a photographic process wood grain. He crowbarred that crap right off the studs and found....an old brick wall! 

Who wouldn't want an indoor brick wall!?

Of course, there was the woman who worked with Peggy and moved into a new place. The previous owners left a picture hanging on the wall, and when she removed it, she found that someone had punched a hole in the drywall and was using that space as a sharps container for used syringes.

Yuck.

Now let's check in on Melissa Brodt out in Boise, Idaho. She and her family bought a house from an estate in December, and started doing renovations.

OK, first order of business, removing the dark green roof shingles that were covering the wall of one of the bedrooms.

Roof shingles. Uh huh.

And beneath them, 1,600 baseball cards, dating back to the 1970s and 80s glued to the plaster wall.

"I was surprised, shocked, confused," Brodt told KTVB-TV. "I wasn't sure what I was looking at until we continued to pull down the shingles."

Brodt contacted Chris Nelson, 44, the son of the original owners. The room in question was his during his teen years when he "was absolutely obsessed with baseball," as he told CNN. "We just decided we were going to wallpaper one of the walls with the excess baseball cards."

It was the 80s. If you weren't there, I can't explain it.

Nelson says he and his folks spent a weekend with a tub of strong glue affixing images of Oil Can Boyd, Coco Crisp and Dick Pole (all real ballplayers!) to the wall, and then, when he was tired of having Shooty Babbit and Milton Bradley (two more) staring at him day and night, someone not named Martha Stewart came up with the idea to cover the cards with roof shingles.

 

As Nelson tells it, he doesn't think there were any really valuable cards up there, but Ms Brodt says, if you want them, come and get 'em!

"I would love for somebody to come in and take it if they think it's useful," Brodt said. "We don't have any interest in keeping it because it doesn't really go with mid-century modern decor and we're not really baseball fans."

Nomenclature alert: "Mid Century Modern" is a term being used to describe junk from the 1950s that you were tired of by the time the 1960s got here. It includes multi-level coffee tables rescued from beach motels, formica-topped kitchen tables, and photos of Connie Stevens telling Edd "Kookie" Byrnes that he is, indeed, the "ginchiest."

You had to be there.