As this is my first post for 2022, first of all, I would like to wish everyone a very happy and prosperous new year. Hopefully, this will be the year that the world regains some form of normality. But let’s not talk about that.

I made a very interesting discovery yesterday which I would like to share.

Since the last of my children moved out of home (then moved back again – twice – with promises that it was definitely his last move home,) we have progressively renovated the house. Last year, the old kitchen was completely ripped out and replaced. We have also repainted rooms, replaced the old, worn carpet with wood-style planks, and installed deeper, older style skirting boards in each room.

The latest room to have a spruce up is the lounge room. Over the years when the children were little, I told them the lounge room is otherwise known as the quiet room, and they have all adhered to the rules – no boisterous playing and no food in the room. It is in this room I have French polished furniture which I bought many years ago when we lived in Sydney. It is also the room with the most bookshelves, so could also be known as the library. The antique piano lives in this room, so if anyone feels inclined to make a noise, they are welcome to play the piano, gently.

Before Christmas, we repainted the lounge room, so all the room needed was new floor coverings, and yesterday was the day the installers arrived to continue the wood-style flooring into the last living area of the house. Exciting!

One installer, Zac, had been to my house before, to replace the floor coverings in my office. They had only been here long enough yesterday to remove the old carpet when Zac asked, “was this house built in 1994?” I told Zac that we had built the house then and had lived here ever since. He told me he had found some newspaper under the carpet, dated March 1994.

Apparently, before real newspapers were mostly replaced by online news subscriptions, it was common practice for carpet installers to put a current piece of newspaper under the new carpet so future occupants of the house knew either when the house was built, or when the last floor coverings were laid.

The carpets were laid throughout our house before we moved in, therefore, I hadn’t known the installers had slipped a tiny piece of history under the flooring, to be found at a later date. But of course, I insisted Zac leave our find in place!

We now have a new, tightly secured floor, except for just one plank. Zac left the fifth plank along the north-eastern wall loose. If he had glued the plank in place it would have destroyed the paper, and that just wouldn’t do!