Original Air Date: October 1, 2026 Episode Number: 479

Episode Summary

Dan opens with two questions: what's the weirdest thing in your house that you've never been able to explain, and what's the strangest thing you've ever found in one that you weren't looking for? Then he spends the full episode on his own answer. His first house was a 1928 place in Zeeland, bought in 1999, and it came with kitchen cabinets mounted so high he needed a ladder to reach the second of four shelves. Nobody could explain them. Converting a dingy basement room into a workshop turned up canning lists penciled on the wall for 1940 through 1944, and newspapers from October 1943 lining the shelves. There's a screwdriver found inside a wall, a map scribbled behind fake cabinet doors, and a nighttime dig in the backyard that turned up nothing. Ten years in, a woman in her eighties knocked on the door, walked through the house her father built, answered the cabinet question in one sentence, and later mailed back something she'd taken with her when the family moved out. The show ends somewhere it usually doesn't: with the case for appreciating your house exactly as it is.

Timestamps

[00:00] -- Weird House Quirks

[01:19] -- My 1928 Zeeland Home

[03:00] -- The Sky High Cabinets

[05:46] -- Basement Workshop Plans

[09:24] -- Canning Lists Discovery

[14:03] -- Sponsor Break

[14:22] -- Newspapers From 1943

[16:41] -- A Winter Day Reflection

[18:55] -- Sponsor Tease

[19:09] -- Paint Is The Project

[19:32] -- Basement Finds Revisited

[19:52] -- The Wall Screwdriver Story

[20:17] -- Cabinet Door Treasure Map

[22:23] -- Night Digging Misadventure

[24:04] -- Visitor From The Past

[25:32] -- Lightning In The Dining Room

[26:29] -- Porch Sleeping Tradition

[27:04] -- Why The Cabinets Were High

[28:50] -- A Gift From Texas

[30:13] -- Ceiling Globe Time Capsule

[31:50] -- A House Full Of History

[34:27] -- Superman Comic Wall Find

[36:51] -- Homes Hold Our Stories

[38:19] -- Appreciate Your Home

[39:25] -- Share Your Weird Finds

[39:41] -- Final Sign Off

Two Questions to Start [00:00]

What's the weirdest thing in your house? Not something you did, something that was already there. A door that opens the wrong way. A patch in the floor where something used to be and nobody knows what. You wonder about it for a while, then you stop seeing it and just live with it.

And the second one: what's the coolest or strangest thing you've ever found in a house that you weren't looking for? Behind a wall, under a floorboard, in the middle of a renovation. What did you think when you found it? Did it tell you anything about the house, or about the people who were there before you?

Most of us live in a place that had a whole life before we showed up, and we almost never think about it.

The House in Zeeland [01:19]

Built 1928. Bought in 1999. The previous owners had finished the entire main level before the sale and it was a major selling point: wallpaper in the dining room, original trim cleaned up, some of it stained and varnished in the bedrooms, new crown molding, new carpet.

The screened front porch was the part Dan misses. Three seasons a year he was out there, coffee in the morning and a book late into the evening, hearing dogs and conversations up and down the block while still having his own space.

The cabinets [03:00]. Two walls of the kitchen had normal uppers and lowers. The third wall had uppers only, mounted so high that Dan could stand under them, jump, and not come close to hitting his head. Reaching the second of four shelves took a ladder, no exaggeration. The top shelf might as well have been Everest. Everybody who walked in noticed within seconds and everybody had a theory. Dan's working theory for years was that the original family was simply enormous.

They weren't. The answer came about ten years in, and it came from the daughter of the man who built them.

The Workshop and the Canning Lists [05:46]

A year or so after moving in, Dan wanted a project. The upstairs needed more work than he was ready to take on, so the dingy basement room with a workbench and floor-to-ceiling shelves became the one. He was working the RepcoLite Lakewood store in Holland at the time, having the same conversations with customers that he has on the radio now, about making a space exactly what you want it to be, and this was his turn to do it in his own house.

A workshop is never just a workshop. It's where maintenance happens, where Pinewood Derby cars get built and painted, where dollhouses get glued and wallpapered for Christmas, where bookcases come together.

The writing on the wall [09:24]. While cleaning, Dan swung a work light into another corner and caught pencil writing he'd walked past repeatedly. Thick cursive, hard to read in bad light. He leaned in genuinely expecting something along the lines of five paces west from the giant maple. What it said was 1940, and under it: four quarts of pickles, five quarts of peaches, eight quarts of green beans, on down the wall. More lists followed for 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1944. Pickles, beans, tomatoes, peaches, jam.

Standing there, he started picturing the shelves across the room loaded with Mason jars two and three deep, and the work it took to fill them. Kids coming down for a jar of peaches. The pop of a lid when the seal breaks. He's fairly sure those kids snuck peaches, on the grounds that he would have.

When he painted the room, floors and walls, he left every section with writing on it untouched.

Newspapers From 1943 [14:22]

Turning to the shelves, Dan found the top ones lined with newspapers from October 1943. Not pristine, not valuable, and he sat reading them for a couple of hours. American troops pushing through Italy. Bombers over Germany. Alongside the war news, ordinary ads and local stories.

That day [16:41]. A Saturday morning in December. Snow coming down hard with a storm on the way, piling up outside the window. A space heater running, a work light hanging from a hook, Dan on the top step of a stepladder so he could reach the shelves.

The people who canned all that food had read this same paper, probably holding it in the same spots his hands were in. The difference is he knew how it all turned out and they didn't. Every story they read ended with an unspoken "to be continued." Did they have a son in the fighting, a nephew, a grandchild? Did he come home? What he does know is that they kept going, because he had their canning lists from the years after.

That was the day it landed: this wasn't just his house.

More Finds in the Walls [19:32]

The screwdriver [19:52]. Found inside a wall during electrical work when the boxes came out. Somebody dropped it and either fished for it or never knew where it went, and spent an afternoon looking.

The map [20:17]. A run of cabinet doors in the kitchen was fake, hinged and nailed over ductwork. Dan assumed they were painted shut. When he finally popped them off during a painting project, expecting bonus storage, he found writing on the wall behind them. This one actually was a map: directions, coordinates, west, east, a number of steps.

He believed it completely. He has joked about this before but has never quite admitted how literally he expected to find buried treasure in his own yard.

The dig [22:23]. He followed the instructions exactly and went out at night, reasoning that nobody would see him. In hindsight that's backward. A man digging in his yard at two in the afternoon is doing yard work. A man digging at midnight is a different story entirely. He found nothing. The visitor later supplied the obvious answer: the instructions marked the property corner.

The Visitor [24:04]

A Saturday knock, about ten years in. The neighbor, and with her a woman Dan didn't know who was in town for the weekend and had grown up in the house. Her father built it. Dan, who describes himself as socially awkward and nervous about unexpected visitors, got out of the way and let her walk through.

The dining room [25:32]. Three big windows above the table. During dinner one evening, with her mother, father and brother at the table, lightning came in through a window, crossed the room along the wall and left through the kitchen. She pointed to the corner that had been scorched black afterward, wallpapered over by then. Storms at that house felt different from then on.

The porch [26:29]. It had been her brother's room every summer and into the fall, because his upstairs bedroom was unbearable in the heat. She said porches up and down the block usually had somebody sleeping on them through the summer.

The cabinets [27:04]. Dan finally asked. Her answer took one sentence: when the house was built, a large chest freezer sat against that wall, and her father hung the cabinets high enough that the lid could open fully without hitting them. The freezer eventually left. The cabinets stayed. The reason got lost, and for decades people stood in that kitchen inventing theories.

The Globe [28:50]

She said she'd send something as a thank you, and Dan assumed it would never arrive, mostly because he's the kind of person who promises to mail things and doesn't. A few weeks later a small package came with a note. Inside was a glass globe from a ceiling fixture, the one over the light in her bedroom the entire time she lived in the house. She'd taken it with her when the family left. She wanted it back in the house.

A House Full of History [31:50]

That house was built ten years after World War I ended and a few years before the Depression. It stood through World War II, Korea and Vietnam. At some point in the mid-sixties, Beatles records were bouncing off those walls. It went through the seventies and eighties. Dan's family bought it in 1999, started raising five kids there, and watched the Tigers go to the World Series in 2006 standing a few feet from where lightning had scorched the dining room decades earlier.

Every house is like that. Either it has a past you didn't live, or you're the start of the story and somebody else will be walking those halls at three in the morning with a baby long after you're gone.

The Superman comic [34:27]. The whole segment started because Dan read about a contractor who found a copy of the first Superman comic in the walls of a house he'd bought for around ten thousand dollars. It sold for $175,000, and would have brought roughly $75,000 more except the back cover tore during a tug-of-war with a relative right after it turned up.

The plan was to open with his own small find and then move on to the spectacular ones. What he realized while writing it was that the canning lists were the valuable part, at least to him. They connected him to people who were gone long before he existed, and made clear that the house would go on adapting to other people after him.

What the walls hold [36:51]

Your rooms are recording your story, and they were important to people before you and will matter to people after. No matter how imperfect the house is, no matter how much you'd change it, it has dignity because of the role it plays.

The woman who toured the house never once complimented the beautiful main-level updates the previous owners had made. Dan isn't sure she even saw them. She was walking through the house as it was seventy years earlier, warts and all, and she loved it.

Appreciate your home [38:19]. This show spends most of its time on updating, improving and painting, and all of that is worth doing. But when the money isn't there, or the time or the energy isn't, a low-level guilt sets in about everything not getting done. So for one week: appreciate your home for what it is, not what it could be, and for what it's been to everyone who's called it home and everyone who will.

Projects and paint come back next week.

Your turn [39:25]

Got a quirk in your house nobody can explain, or did you find something unexpected during a project? Send it to [email protected]. Dan would like to read them, and if enough come in they'll turn into a segment.

Resources

• Researching Your Own Home, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University. A Michigan-specific walkthrough of deeds, building permits, assessor records and census records for tracing who lived in your house: https://www.cmich.edu/research/clarke-historical-library/explore-collection/explore-online/michigan-material/aladdin-company-bay-city/researching-your-own-home
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Library of Congress. Block-by-block maps of most Michigan towns showing building footprints, materials and additions over time: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
• Archives of Michigan and the Michiganology digital archive, for vital records, county records and local history: https://www.michigan.gov/archivesofmichigan
• The Action Comics No. 1 wall find, reported in 2013: https://www.cbr.com/action-comics-1-found-in-wall-of-house-sells-for-175000/
• Past episodes: repcolite.com, click the Podcast tab on the homepage.

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