Most random find in a new house?

[ContraryToPopularBelief]

So we picked up our keys for our new house today. The sellers have been so nice. The house is super clean and they've left thoughtful things like a hedge clipper and lawnmower. All good.

However... on the back of one of the bedroom doors there is a sheep's skull!!!! 😱

Utterly random! So what's the most random thing your found when you moved in to a new house?

but a friend renovated her house and found the skeleton of a child in the wall

Wow, a skeleton in the wall!

We found two Victorian police truncheons.

A safe screwed to the wardrobe wall with loads scientology papers. We lived in west sussex down the road from their 'church's but it was the letters asking them to come back and pay their way to get their status back that made me feel on edge. That and the fellow scientologists continuously knocking on our doors to find them and interrogations to see if we were hiding them.... they kept walking into our back garden looking through our windows... It stopped when they were satisfied we weren't hiding their 'friend's. Totally understand why they ran away now!!

Like many of the above, our house was left in a complete tip the day we moved in. Fag butts, rubbish in the kitchen cupboards, dog poo in the garden etc. But we weren’t expecting the dog poo in the bedrooms, flea ridden carpets, gun cabinet in the loft room and bag of cocaine just inside the loft hatch...

Oh yes and before that we found a woman's eating in a bed side drawer. A condom wrapper and old bacon in the grill. It had been empty for about 6 months before we moved in. But the bacon looked like it was a few days old and the landlord and his wife lived in France. However the landlord came to the UK frequently. We reckon he was having an affair using the empty house as no one had lived there for 6 months... He was down AF though.

Dodgy not down.

Well, I have a house to sell, so it;s handy to know what I should leave behind......

Dildo in a sock in the wardrobe!

MrsAshwell,
you should deliberately leave a mystery, half hidden in the attic, obviously from some former owner decade ago, maybe a diary....

Print out that long and weird thread about the safe in the attic - and hide it in a locked safe in the attic.

Our last house had nearly a tonne of plywood in the loft, along with two dead bicycles and some really creepy Mormon RE books for children. Now, most RE books have Jesus surrounded by children. He might occasionally have his hand on their heads. These had jowly balding men in Reservoir Dogs suits, with little girls in short dresses on their knees. Bleurgh.
Our new house was quite empty, although the whole thing is fully wired for TV in every room, complete with screen mounts.

airandmung beans: do you check the water level in the tank in the loft. I never thought about it. Then in 2008 something happened to the ballcock and the water level, which should have been a few inches, rose, and rose to the top, soaked in all the wood in the rafters, then the insulation and after saturation point had been reached with the ceilings and carpets it came rushing down from the landing to the cupboard under the stairs and cascaded through the light fitting in the lounge, ruining the loft and six rooms. It would have been worse if we did not have full insurance. Even so it was a nightmare and it must have taken months to get to that point. It never occurred to my late husband and I that anything like it would happen, and I know of no-one else. Fortunately we had built an extension for our disabilities so we lived downstairs.

@llizzie those tanks are also supposed to have an emergency overflow pipe out the side of the house, so there were at least two things gone wrong there! One shouldn't usually need to check. Glad you were insured...

place marking

A plastic Viking helmet and a pair of crutches!

Rented house, moved in and while cleaning the kitchen cupboards came across a little toiletry bag full of used needles and a small amount of heroin, phoned police and they came to collect them. The officer then asked if I minded him looking around as previous tenant was now in jail. Police officer went atraight for the kivking boards under the kitchen cypbiards and retriwved a tupperware box with more drugs and a set of scales. Then upstairs they found a bag of what I believe was cannabis in the airing cupboard on a ledge high up, I thpught that was the worst of it till they dropped the loft hatvh and found a number of wilted plants, and heating equipment tents etc (Thankfully I hadnt turned electric on yet as I was waiting for landlord to check things out) or id have had a bill sky high. Last but not least they went into my bedroom inside a walk in cupboard and lifted up a small part of floorboard and found a cash tin full of notes £560 I think they said and a book full of names and numbers.
I didnt stay very long, I kept worrying about what if they came out looking for their drugs and money.

I got to my new house then suddenly remembered I had left a half eaten tub of ice cream in my old freezer at my old home- I was mortified!

I found a toilet brush they had left for me.....

SPOONBLENDER: thank you. neither the house insurance nor the builders employed by the insurers said nothing about that and it concerns me.

Nothing like you lot found!

My friend did though! after knocking through into her inglenook she found 2 pairs of children’s shoes. If a child died in the house the family left the shoes there to stop the soul of the child from leaving the home😢

We didn’t find any whilst knocking through ours.

Well, I have a house to sell, so it;s handy to know what I should leave behind......

My parents bought an old farmhouse, they had a sledge hammer party in their first week.

1. in the living room, there was tiny modernish fireplace and the wall to either side sounded hollow. They all sledgehammered the false wall away, and found a HUGE inglenook fireplace, 6' thick front to back, and at each side a massive alcove going right back to the outside wall, so 2 x 6' deep alcoves, big enough for an armchair. One alcove had the base of a stone spiral staircase in it, at which point we realised th elarge walk in cupboard in the room above was where the top of the staircase had been. Both alcoves had windows in, and the other one (apart from the staircase) had a deep shelf in the thickness of the wall which was the old bread oven.

They then realised that the false walling went right round the room, thick wooden batons with plaster board and wallpaper fixed to the original walls, taking a good 4" of the walls all round, rhey sledgehammered those off too. Change it from a poky characterless room to a wonderful farmhouse living room.

1. There was a wall betweent the dining room and kitchen, not weight bearing and created a funny awkward corridor. They were planning to re-do the kitchen, and wanted to include that space, so we took down that wall too. It was brick, with several layers of foil on it, then paper and paint. The bricks were so damp that they had crumbled away to nothing behind the tin foil. (house wasn't damp, but that wall was onto the earth with no damp course!

1. When they finally did the kitchen, they foudn a cellar filled in with rubble under the floor.

4 they ripped up the carpets ont he same day and found beautiful original flagstones all down the corridor

This thread is fantastic (definitely has the whiff of classics about it) and very timely as we just moved last week. I was feeling a bit grumbly as we cleaned out house top to bottom, left all the lightshades and curtains and even a bottle of prosecco and some teddy bear biscuits for the kids. When we got into our new place they had taken every lightshade, around half the lightbulbs, left dustballs and crumbs all over the floors and a scummy dishwasher with manky filter. Oh and last night DH went to pull the curtains and the curtain pole in our room fell off

Still I feel we got off lightly reading some of these! Can't believe the utter filth some of you have had to clean - was it like that when you viewed and bought the houses?

When we moved into our last place we found a child's electronic keyboard and some computer speakers, both of which we still use.

We've been into our new place to clean, and in addition to mould in the baby's room that wasn't there when we looked round we have found- a box of Tupperware, a slate cheese board and a cheese knife.

Trunk filled with old postcards in loft (according to my dh as I have never been up there 🤷🏼‍♀️

Print out that long and weird thread about the safe in the attic - and hide it in a locked safe in the attic.

Genius!

Unfortunately, it's my Mum and Dad's house and the clearing out is monstrous as they've been there 45 years. We're not looking forward to the cupboard under the stairs. We're wondering if Elon Musk has some sort of vehicle that will take us right to the back!