I don’t know what these little penciled numbers mean, but I love finding tidbits of when the house was originally built (1903/1905), especially because there’s so little “original” left. Since starting our renovation, we’ve determined the house was first gutted in the mid-’50s and had been poorly maintained ever since (e.g. I’ve found remnants of the original trim being used to hold up the rafters in our garage built in 1954 😩). This thick orange paper within each stud cavity must have been an early version of the Tyvek house wrap we use today. The paper is so water-stained because we don’t have separate shiplap separating the siding from the studs—our original siding *is* the shiplap, which means it’s hard to keep out every drop of water. Before we can address the siding, we have to put in seismic shear walls per city code, so we have to clean out all the stud cavities of this paper and ’50s insulation, and remove all the lath and drywall nails from each of the studs. After that, *all* of our siding—these wood walls you see here—has to come off to put in the shear walls (plywood). We could have installed the shear from the inside but we wanted to save every possible inch we could in our little house. And with even more water leaking in from outside due to the nail holes caused by a second layer of cedar shake installed on top of our original lapsiding, we wanted to re-side anyway. In short, our house must become a full skeleton before it can become whole again. Yikes. ☠️