The Patio Building Series:
Part 1: Garage Demolition
Part 2: Treasure Hunt! Part 3: Laying The Concrete Part 4: Fences and Retaining Walls Part 5: Cobblestones, Belgian Blocks and Granite Setts Part 6: Cobblestone Windfall! Part 7: Making a Stone Patio
Part 8: Shed Building
In part 1 of this series about our big backyard project, I wrote about how refreshing it was to demolish the two-car garage taking up our entire backyard. It opened things up incredibly, but left us with a huge area to use as we please.
Just a big pile of dirt where a garage used to be
We were left with a big square of dirt going all the way up to the house. It’s a pretty basic shape. We decided to put concrete back in where it had been before, between the house and the garage, and fill the footprint of the garage with our patio. We had dreams of doing the entire space in brick pavers or stone, but it would’ve cost an even huger amount of money than we were already about to spend.
Plus I was a bit worried about drainage. Since the lot slopes towards the house, we have to make sure all of the water goes into a drain and into the sewer. We are lucky enough to have a completely dry basement, and I thought a concrete patio, at least around the foundation, would be the best way to keep it that way.
Laying this much concrete would’ve been too big a job for us to handle, and since I’ve never worked with concrete before, this was not the time to start, so we subbed it out. This was the second and last job that we’ve contracted out.
Soon to be filled with freshly poured concrete
It took a while to get concrete guys to show up (I hate dealing with contractors) and when they did, they made us level the lot partially. Apparently there was an uneven rise near the back deck (see left) so we had to move dirt around to even it all out.
At first I was annoyed that we had to do this ourselves, but boy am I glad we did.
Soon after we started moving the dirt from under the stairs and the deck, we started finding objects. We knew we’d find garbage, we just didn’t think it would be that old…
We started digging out pieces of plates and glasses. Unidentifiable pieces of iron. Little wheels. Where did this stuff come from?
Marge found a plate with a mark on the back. After some Google sleuthing, she was able to figure out that the plate was manufactured in 1890! Our house was built in 1860, so clearly, someone was throwing their broken plates out the window into the dirt outside.
We kept digging. The more we dug, the more we found. We found old iron nails. We found a smoking pipe! And by the foundation, we found SHOES. Honest to god, shoes!
Shoe!
Margie says that people used to bury their shoes near the foundation of a new house to bring them good luck. I’m not superstitious, but I’ll admit, taking these shoes out of the ground creeped me out a little. First, would it bring a curse upon us? And second, they’re shoes. Someone’s foot used to go in there.
We found four small shoes, so we’re guessing both pairs are children’s shoes. Which makes sense, because which shoes would be the ones you don’t need and can be buried in the dirt? The kids’ shoes that they’ve outgrown. You can tell that they were handcrafted shoes, and to make the heel, they simply put layer after layer of leather until it was thick enough.
Then we started finding bottles. In tact bottles!
Shocking as this may seem, these bottles are from the early 1860s. You know what that means, dont’cha? That means someone drank out of these bottles just after our house was built brand new, and threw them out the window where they’ve been sitting for 150 years! Holy history, Batman!
We did a lot of Googling and found out the history behind all these bottles, so please indulge me.
This is a pepper sauce bottle. Apparently pepper sauce was always sold in bottles shaped like this. It has six sides and cathedral-like details. If you look closely, you’ll see stuff at the bottom. Those are the pepper seeds!
This is a freshly dug bottle of Van Buskirk’s Sozodont, with the cork still in it! Sozodont was the first commercially available mouthwash, and from what I understand, it was extremely popular. There are so many bottles remaining out there in the world, that this would only sell for about $5.00 today. But hey, this one still has the Sozodont in it! Anyone want to try?
We found two bottles like this. Oxygenated Bitters, for Dypepsia, Asthma, and General Debility.
We found two of these deep blue “blob top” bottles. When people first started carbonating beverages, they had to change the bottle designs so that they wouldn’t explode under the pressure. Blob top bottles are very thick and heavy. These were manufactured in Troy, and that deep blue color makes them very valuable to collectors.
This one has a cork pushed into it. Marge was disgusted to find that one of the blue bottles had crewed tobacco in it! You know what that means: Someone’s great-great-great grandfather was chewing tobacco and spitting it into this bottle 150 years ago!
And here’s the local favorite. This bottle was made for a store right here in Cohoes!
My guess is that it was a kitchen staff of the first owners drinking sody-pop in the and throwing the bottles out the door. Marge recognized that, since we keep our recycling outside the back door, we are probably repeated their exact steps with our own modern bottles. Except, y’know, ours go into the recycling and not the ground.
Marge’s mom is a local history buff and she said this type of find is basically unheard of today. You never find a stash like this, so we feel very lucky. I love living history stuff, and I’ve never felt so close to people in the past as digging up all their old untouched junk.
We’ve always loved historical artifacts like these, and keep our eye out for them in the wild. We even have a little-used metal detector. Who knew that biggest stash of historical artifacts we’d ever find was right outside our back door? Digging this stuff up was honestly one of the most exciting experiences of my life. Is that weird?
And that might not be all. We only stopped digging because it was getting late and the concrete guys were coming the next day. We’re pretty sure we checked all of the dirt that is now covered by concrete, but the best finds, the bottles, were just within reach under the deck. Soon we will have to replace the deck, and when that happens the hunt is back on!