With my building having been built in 1915, my apartment has a fair amount of 'character.' We can see where it was divided with the apartment next door. Our bedroom used to be the dining room and had large French doors. There's no proper grounding in the electrical outlets. Some of the doors have old-fashioned keyholes. The bathtub is actually a cast iron one with feet that have been covered up by tile; there is no flat part on which to stand, and the overflow drain goes nowhere that's helpful. Looking at more recent times, our door has three locks and a chain, and a vestigial part from an alarm system.

One of the more interesting items is a square bump in the kitchen wall. My former roommate's father, a man of encyclopedic knowledge in areas that you wouldn't even know how to look up, identified it as a potato bin. Apparently it was a box built into the wall such that the lack of insulation made it a natural refrigerator in the winter. It had been sealed shut by many layers of paint, and I didn't think about it much after that, until its paint started peeling and I wanted to scrape it all off and repaint, perhaps with an accent color. I didn't know if I'd be able to get it open in the process, but it was an intriguing possibility.

Sure enough, while chipping away around the edges, I saw it budge, and it wasn't much of a struggle from there. The bin contained cobwebs, a bottle of lemon cleanser, a sponge, a rag, a spring, and a bar of soap. It had been lined with linoleum. The sponge started to crumble when I touched it. Interesting to think about the lives of those who last saw these items, and how this bin went from one use to another and then was sealed and forgotten.