Thinking of renovating?? Maybe your old house has a "beer chute"!

[steve58]

Imagine finding buried treasure in your home.

One metro family did, and it'd been there for more than 70 years. The goodies they found are worth thousands.

At one historic home in Kansas City's affluent Brookside neighborhood, no one expected a man with a hammer would uncover history.

Colby Marval said he was working on that house's front porch, when he found one of the porch's column was a treasure chest in disguise.

The house dates back to the 1920's. The column was filled with empty whiskey bottles and beer cans from the 1940's, many of which were still in good condition.

"We opened up the top of it, and 100 cans came out," Marval said.

Danielle Molder said she's owned the home for several years, and she recently decided to renovate. Those cans and bottles are 70 years old, and they aren't garbage. In fact, websites like EBay show some of them can fetch a solid paycheck from collectors.

"A quick Google research showed some of these Falstaff cans can go for 40 to 50 dollars. I've got at least 20 to 30 of these guys," Molder told FOX4.

The contents of the containers are long gone. Molder said she couldn't believe there was a small fortune hidden in her home.

"It was a jackpot of 1940s -- every variety of whiskey and bourbon you can imagine. Tons of old vintage beer cans. Many of them in amazing condition," Molder said. "There's collectors and now, overnight, I have an extensive collection."

Molder and her family also discovered that front porch column has a hole near the top. A chute that enabled the past homeowner to drop cans and bottles into the column where they were unlikely to be seen again.

"It could have been the wife," Molder said as her family and contractors laughed. "The wife? The kids? It drives you to drinkin'."

"I was happy for our owners, and for them to be able to find something that's worth value," Marval added.

And to whomever tipped those drinks decades ago, your name remains a secret.

https://fox4kc.com/2019/07/23/home-renovation-in-brookside-uncovers-stash-of-beer-cans-whiskey-bottles-worth-thousands/

p.s. My current house was built ~1989.  We are the third or fourth owners.  When we had to have the HVAC replaced around 2007, we had the ducts cleaned out.  While we didn't find anything worth $$, the workers did pull 2 empty beer cans out of the MBR ducts

[JasonPratt]

A surprising number of old houses around here are built around pioneer log cabins. And you'd never know just looking at them; you'd think, huh, that house was built in the 50s or 60s, maybe early 70s, or whenever they were last renovated. But the inner structure? -- one hundred percent log cabin, dating from the early 1800s or even earlier.

Our high school's senior history teacher had a project of identifying and reclaiming those cabins when the houses were slated for demolition, so on such years the senior history class would be tasked with helping pull out and dismantle them. (And every senior history class would give a demonstration of pioneer life on certain school open-house days.) My class got to add one of those cabins on the school's historical site, whereupon I learned that I could have probably made a good living even today being a bricklayer!

The process of cleaning out the cabins often turns up interesting archaeological and historical artifacts. I pulled out, and got to keep, some hidden water rights to land in Arizona! -- although I have no idea where they are now. At the time, pre-internet, there was no easy way to check whether the rights were real or a scam, so there's a good chance I figured they were some old scam from the early 1900s. Maybe one day I'll run across them again, and discover they were real after all...

(Me being me, there's a good chance they're serving as a bookmark somewhere. ;) )