‘What am I looking at?’ 1,600 baseball cards glued to the wall uncovered in Idaho home

Melissa Brodt was dreading finding out what could possibly be behind shingles in her newly purchased Idaho home.

The wall had exterior roof shingles plastered on an interior wall. It made Brodt “a little suspect.”

“I was thinking, ‘oh boy,’” Brodt told McClatchy News in an interview. “What’s going on behind there?”

What she found was 1,600 baseball cards glued to the wall.

The house was built in 1969 in Boise’s West Bench, Brodt said. The original homeowner had the house until he died. Brodt, a real estate agent herself, bought the home from his family at the end of 2021.

Brodt and her 23-year-old son planned to give it a midcentury modern remodel.

They spent weeks working on the place. One Sunday afternoon, Brodt had been pulling up floorboards and getting the floor down to its wood base.

After working hard in the rest of the house, she decided to tackle the wall of shingles.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’m already dirty. I’m already gross. I’m just gonna do hard things and deal with whatever I find,’” Brodt said. “I thought it was going to be more single shingles. I didn’t realize they’d come up (in) sheets.”

She pulled the shingles hard, and they came off in a sheet.

“What am I looking at?” she said. “It took me a minute to figure out what was underneath there.”

Colorful baseball cards spanned the entire wall.

The conversation then shifted to thinking about what they should do now. They wondered if the baseball cards had any value, but after being plastered to the wall for years, Brodt didn’t think they could be worth much.

The family members aren’t huge baseball fans, but the wall has captured the attention of many who are. After KTVB originally reported the story, national news outlets began to share it as well.

Once fans saw the wall of baseball cards, Brodt started getting all kinds of requests.

Some people were demanding she keep the wall in her home. Others wanted to tour the home and see the wall for themselves.

For now, however, Brodt is just processing the discovery and thinking about what could come next.

“I think the mystery is still out on what to do,” Brodt said. “There’s lots of people whose opinions are for us to keep it, now we have to. But aesthetically, it’s not really something we would want to keep. I would love for it to go to somebody who thinks it’s useful.”

This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 12:54 PM with the headline "‘What am I looking at?’ 1,600 baseball cards glued to the wall uncovered in Idaho home."