One of my friends purchased a home and wanted some electrical work done in the bathroom.  He had decided that he wanted a fixture installed on each side of the medicine cabinet.  In order to feed both fixtures it was necessary to remove the medicine cabinet from the wall.

Most medicine cabinets are fastened to a stud on one or both sides of the cabinet from the inside.  I could not find any screws, or other type of fasteners for that matter, anywhere on the inside of the cabinet.  I used some flat bladed screwdrivers, my fingernails and my fingers to wedge the medicine cabinet out of the wall and carefully placed it on the floor.

I noticed the end of a string, which had been behind the cabinet trim, adhering to the outside of the wall opening.  I tugged on it and there was weight behind it.  The string was telling me to pull on it.  I carefully reeled in the string like taking a fish out of a stream, and on the other end was an empty whiskey bottle.  Apparently the bottle had laid inside the wall so long that everything inside had evaporated.  I gave it to the home owner as a souvenir.

I guess one of the previous inhabitants had used the area below the medicine cabinet as a place to hold his liquor.

When I completed the wiring job, I fastened the medicine cabinet securely to the wall.

Another time I and another electrician were working on a three story house on the South Hill.  It was a very old house.  We were trying to fish wires over a dropped ceiling on the bottom floor.  The other electrician poked his head up through an opening in the ceiling.  He could see something shining across the room.  We finally got it out and discovered it was a sealed bottle of good whiskey.

The whiskey had to be 100 years old.  We turned it over to the home owner, who told us we would break it open when the remodel was finished.  I’m sure at the time no one realized the real value of the bottle or its contents.

I came to this conclusion when we finished the job and no one made any reference to the whiskey.

It makes you wonder how many items are tucked away in the nooks and crannies of buildings all over the world.