Eleven tins of paint, each with a label in black marker capitals, each with a lid that had been hammered shut by someone who never expected to open it again. They were in a cardboard box on the shed shelf, and I found them on Thursday evening while looking for a trowel. The top one said BACK BEDROOM 1997. Under that was HALL MAGNOLIA, and under that was LANDING (NOT THE SAME MAGNOLIA).
Dennis lived in this house for 45 years. When he moved into a care home in Hillsborough in spring 2024, his daughter Karen took the photographs, a clock and his good coat, and left the rest. Her email before completion had one line I've kept: "Keep or bin anything, honestly." I took her at her word, and in four months I have kept far more than I've binned, which Matt says is exactly how a person ends up staying somewhere for 45 years.
The paint tins
The labels are a small history of the house. FRONT DOOR BROWN 96 (2 COATS) explains the faded door. BATHROOM WALLS 1992 explains nothing, because the bathroom is peach and the tin turned out to be a sort of oatmeal. I prised two open. The back bedroom tin had set solid into a yellow puck, but the hall one was still liquid under its skin, and it is the exact colour of our hall, so that one is staying for touch-ups. Kev took the other ten to the tip on his next run, with the remark that Dennis had clearly never thrown away a tin in his life.
The shed also held four biscuit tins of seeds, labelled in the same capitals. One said RUNNER BEANS 2023, KEEP DRY. Jas says seeds that old can surprise you, so I have put ten on damp kitchen roll on the windowsill to see.
Manuals and a service book
In the kitchen drawer, in a clear plastic wallet, was the boiler manual with the installer's pages from 2014 still in it. The service record at the back has a single stamp, from 2016, followed by a page of empty boxes. I've decided that counts as service history, of a sort. In the same wallet were a guarantee card for a washing machine that is no longer with us and the manual for the fridge-freezer.
The fridge-freezer is from 2008, according to the plate inside the door, and Karen said she was surprised it still worked. It does, with a shudder every twenty minutes or so, and I've ordered a £12 plug-in monitor to find out what it costs us to run. The manual is staying in the drawer. The fridge-freezer is staying until it dies.
The wall in the meter cupboard
The best find needed a head torch. On completion day I photographed the meters in the cupboard under the stairs and only looked at the numbers. This week, checking the labels on the new consumer unit, I finally read the wall beside it. On the bare plaster, in pencil, is a column of dates and readings in Dennis's hand: ELEC 14.3.94 38120, GAS 2.9.97 4217, and so on every few months until about 2003, when I think he either gave up or the meter reader took over.
Among the numbers are instructions to himself. FUSE 3 = UPSTAIRS LIGHTS. FUSE 5 = KITCHEN SOCKETS (NOT TOASTER + KETTLE). STOP TAP UNDER SINK, STIFF, TWO HANDS. That last one would have saved me twenty minutes on our first weekend.
The electricians who replaced the old fuse board in March worked around that pencil for a full day without rubbing any of it out, and one of them said it would be a shame. We kept the notes. I photographed them first, and nobody is allowed to paint that wall.
The key
Then there is the key. It is brass, about 8 cm long, hanging on a nail in the shed from a loop of green garden twine, and it has no label at all, which makes it unique in Dennis's filing system. I have tried it in the front door, the back door, the shed padlock, the window locks, the meter cupboard and Dennis's old metal toolbox. Maureen examined it over the wall and said, "That's not one of ours." Karen replied by email that she had no idea. Kev held it up to the light and said "old wardrobe", though none of our wardrobes agrees. It lives on a hook by the back door now, in case it ever finds its lock.
