Mystery solved!

Matt and Heather aka "The Perrys on Perry", nailed it on the head - hidden away under layers of paint and caulked into the wall for safekeeping we discovered the original set of pocket doors between our living and dining room! Christmas in February! Not too many original features survived the Ugly Duckling's long history as rental property so this discovery has us all giddy and excited!

A narrow piece of wood covered the opening at the top. It came out quickly tapping it lightly with a hammer. Original tracks are still in there. So was a lot of dust and a few smaller chunks of plaster.

Here's the hubby chipping away at half-inch think caulk and layers of paint. I took it from there - the sweet advantage of only working part-time, heh. And after 2 more hours (and many many decades) I managed to wrangle the left door out of its pocket.

Unlike the rest of the trim work in the Ugly Duckling, the pocket doors aren't covered in layer upon layer of paint which makes us believe they were retired fairly early on in the history of the house. Thank God, because I doubt the doors and their original hardware would have survived in place and unpainted for that long.

Close up of the beautiful hardware

So, now our livingroom looks like this

Pardon the dust, we have a teeny bit of construction going on at the moment and I didn't get around to mopping the floors ... yet :) The current weather isn't helping at all - gloomy skies make for gloomy pictures.

To the right you can see where we re-opened the now archway, future french doors to the entry hall. On the left is our humongous bricked in fireplace (we have plans for that), straight ahead you can see a pocket door peeking out from its pocket (it's still a little shy and doesn't want to come out all the way but who can blame it? I'd be shy if I'd been caulked into a wall for decades) and beyond that the dining room (filled with old kitchen cabinets). You even get a glimpse of the breezeway to the kitchen in the farthest right corner of the dining room.