Very cool idea. It looks great. Be sure you write the date and year before you cover this up.

Absolutely necessary... When we were recently installing drywall in our basement, we found a message written during construction by my father, who had passed away 23 years earlier and no one knew he had done it. It was so amazing and touching to see his message...

To be on the safe side, we also licked the house so now it’s ours!

Congratulations on the new house, and it sounds like a great plan for taking care of yourself and yours. :)

Nice idea and see if future people can find it. Good luck with the build.

Before I put drywall up I add the front page of the local newspaper with the top headlines of the day. I've done this on every remodel I've been involved with.

When I remodeled one of the bedrooms in my old house in SoCal I found a page from a local newspaper from 1947. When I remodeled my kitchen in my current house I found newspaper from 1951 used to plug an old vent hole in the wall.

I love doing tearout on remodels because you find so much cool history.

Great idea!

When I started (trying) to remodel my previous house, we found just this sort of information in the wall by the front door. Unfortunately, the house was too far gone and we remodeled it with a backhoe.

A former girlfriend's family renovated their 1914 home in East Hampton, Connecticut around 1984. Inside the wall one room, they found a Camel cigarette tin and some other pocket stuff -- a few coins, a cheap folding knife. The girl's father, a plumber, said it was a tradition back in the day to leave some pocket loot to appease the little home gods or whatever.

I not only wrote stuff on the beams of my cottage--as did the carpenters--but I included pieces from all the other homes we'd ever lived in, like a switchplate from the house my grandparents had built back in the 1940's and square nails from the house we renovated in the 1980's.

I also had my grandmother sign her name on one of the studs by the front door.

My dad and I included things we'd salvaged, like windows and doors, and some carpet from my uncle's home when they re-did it. The claw foot bathtub came from our next-door neighbor's house, and in the utility closet is a piece of panelling from the house I grew up in, which Dad cut out when he and Grandpa put a window in between the kitchen and the garage. The house is pretty much built out of spare parts and stuff I collected along the way.

That's why it's called Magpie House.

Good luck with your new home, Michele!

That's better than my idea. When my friends and I were remodeling houses we would put hidden dick drawings behind all the drywall. Dozens of them. That way if somebody happened upon "Hidden dick #53" they would be curious about the others.