When Melissa Board purchased a fixer-upper house in Boise, Idaho for $324,000, she knew she had a lot of work to do. Renovation started immediately, but no room in the house needed more work than the bedroom. The yucky green wall definitely had to go. With courage, she decided to deal with whatever was underneath it.
The first step was peeling off the faux-tile wallpaper. The more she peeled, the more she revealed. Hidden behind the wall was a giant collection of baseball cards. The baseball cards just kept coming. She counted them and found 64 across and 25 down. That made 1,600 cards.
With one mystery solved, another came to light. Whose cards were they? Mystery solved. Chris Nelson grew up in the house, and that was his baseball card collection from 30 years ago. Melissa could see his childhood happening in this bedroom.
Melissa asked how he got them all on the wall. He said, “get the glue on the back and then stick them up here and get them into a spot, get them stuck up there next to each other as well as we could until they would stay.”
But just how valuable is the card collection? Could there be a million-dollar Babe Ruth collectible somewhere in there? How about a Mickey Mantle? To find out, they consulted memorabilia appraiser Lila Dunbar, who said they are of little value. She said cards like these from the 1980s were mass-produced, and the fact that they were glued to a wall doesn’t help either.
Melissa says she may just cover up the wall or maybe those cards will be found again in another 30 years. She’s not sure she has the heart to rip them down. Not to make her feel worse, but a few months ago, a single baseball card from the early 1900s sold for a record 6.6 million dollars.