Secret Messages

By Beth

When my husband and I bought our first home, we started almost immediately to add secret messages to it.  Everytime we had to move something semi-permanent to paint around it - a bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, etc. - we added a secret message behind it before we put it back into place.  So, behind the mirror in the master bedroom it says C.B. loves B.B. and the date we painted it.  The mirror in the upstairs hall bath hides my daughter's name, put there before she was born and before anybody but us knew what her name would be.  And high up on the inside wall of the linen closet, the part where you have to go inside the closet and turn around to see it, is our first secret announcement that our son was on the way.

We sold that first house five years ago, and have spent the time adding new secret messages to our curent house.  I wonder if our secrets are still safe in out old house.  The ones behind the mirrors, maybe not, since people do paint and they are likely to have been discovered.  The linen closet I bet is still safe though, unknown to anybody but us.  And I like to think that maybe if they have been found, the new owners might have left them there, or even added their own secret messages along with ours.

Have you every hidden secret messages in your house?  If you found one someone else had left, would you paint over it or let it be?

(Image from fig studio, since my secret messages are secrets.)

Comments

[Em]

What a cool idea!
A friend of mine from high school who moved a decent amount used to write poems/notes in her closets before she moved in hopes that the new owners would find them. I never moved as a kid so this would have never occurred to me. Now that I have a house of my own I'll have to add some of these secret messages. :)

[J]

When they constructed a new church sanctuary/pulpit at a church I went to as a teen, they invited the congregation to write all over the walls and floors before they put the drywall and the carpeting on it all. People wrote scripture verses and all kinds of messages. I remember I was bummed that I missed that event!

When I was young one of the houses we lived in had some "kid graffiti" as I would call it, including "Chelsea was here" type messages and a rather creepy face with jagged teeth in the unfinished part of the basement drawn with crayon. We weren't big fans of that "secret message." :) I like the idea of sweet messages though...although I wonder if people would be annoyed at having to paint over them, or having to think too much about the previous owners/inhabitants? It might be weird?

[Meg]

When we added a railing the porch at our old house, we put a photo of how the house looked when we bought it and sealed it in one of the pillars we added. Maybe if someone remodels the house in the future, they will find a photo of what the house looked like in old 2006.

We need to add some new secrets to our new house!

[Katrina]

My husband and I recently bought a new house and our first big project was to put in a entry closet. We wrote our last name and the date on the inside of the last pieces of drywall we put up. We plan to do that on all the projects to come... he's and architect... there will be many more.