Seacoast History Blog #50
June 6, 2009  

Today Pete Robie put the final touches on our new kitchen. The renovation would have taken just a month, except for a tiny two-inch spacer that added a week to the project. My wife, Maryellen is over the moon. She has been wanting to do this since we moved into our historic Atlantic Heights house a decade ago. Only one thing made us sad. To rebuild the kitchen counters, we had to destroy a “secret hiding place” created by a former owner. (Continued below)

I’m going to let my wife tell this story.  But first let me explain that we saved the secret hiding place, a curved hand-crafted container of hammered aluminum and wood. We filled it with pictures of the old kitchen, of ourselves, and inserted a few trinkets and mementoes. Then today, before Pete attached the counter top, we placed the secret hiding container into the two inch space between the counter and the brick wall. It is entombed there now, our own private time capsule, until the next owners of the house tear up the new cabinets sometime in the future.

I asked Maryellen to write about the secret hiding place, and we enclosed her story inside the time capsule. Her story begins on the next page:

CONTINUE Secret Compartment Story & Photos