If you live in an old house what's the most weird / interesting thing you've found?

[Comps83]

I live in a boring new build which I hate
Hoping to move to a Victorian terrace with period features soon
If you live in an older property what have you found when ripping out 70s plaster board or carpets , in the loft etc.?
I love anything like this

We took the carpet up in the dining room to find newspaper had been used as underlay. Carpet was about 30 years old. The majority of the news covered was about the murder trial of a famous case where a husband had killed his wife and dumped her body in a lake in the Lakes. But weirdly dh knows the husband who only got a 4 year jail sentence so has been out of prison for ages.

My house is Georgian. We did tonnes of work to it, including stripping back the ground floor ceilings to the support beams.

Turns out that each beam is made from a single tree trunk, running the length of the house. They're massive.

I love the idea that if the trees were cut down in 1800 ish to build the house, they must have been planted hundreds of years before that. So our house contains bits of a Tudor (perhaps?) forest.

My df's house had an Anderson shelter in the back garden. It had 4 little bunks in it. We used to play in there as kids until the spiders took over.

A Victorian house and found an Anderson Shelter under shed!

@ZadieZadie we had similar replacing wood wormed floorboards in a property of a similar age. Joists made of tree trunks with flattened tops, adze marks and wood shavings undisturbed for the best part of 300 years. Very cool.

My house was built in 1908 and I’m desperate to find something!! I’ve renovated two rooms but sadly only found a load of modern paint tins and decorating tools in a window seat
I have a very small loft hatch, which has bolts on it! I really want to have a nosey up there, but I live alone so also too scared! Might need to convince a friend to help me one day.

I recently moved into a 250 year old Weavers cottage. I found an old loom tool in the loft. The house has a set of outside steps which now lead to nowhere. They were access to the third floor weaving rooms.

The whole house tells so many stories.

Nothing interesting in the house other than a bra down the back of the radiator. But I used to work and also live in an old pub which had a random locked door in the ladies toilets that no-one seemed to know where it went or what was in it. One night after hours during a lock in I decided to try every single one of the eleventy billions keys that had been hanging around all over the place and eventually one of them worked. It lead to another dusty cellar full of rubbish and an old sweepy todd style salon chair. Gave me the creeps so I locked the door and never went in there again.

*Sweeny Todd

@Scrowy love this

Another house my 1st h and I lived in was originally part of some stables for a blacksmith. We bought it from an elderly couple who had lived there for yonks.
We completely gutted the inside and in doing so found pamments under 3 layers of lino, a layer of newspaper and a layer if carpet. The kitchen was long and thin and half was a pantry, it had 1 cold tap and an ancient electric cooker, the pamments had a groove worn into it from walking backwards and forwards.
The front room had an inglenook fireplace that we found after removing some ugly brown painted wood and a 1950's fireplace, next to it was a bread oven.
When removing the wall paper, 3 layers, plus a layer of newspaper, we discovered old lead covered cable, plus more modern cable and the old gas light fixings capped off.
Upstairs involved going up a staircase that went round the chimney breast, it was divided into 2 rooms. The first room had an old fireplace boarded over. The dividing wall was lath and plaster. So much fun demolishing it. We discovered, when removing the plaster off the walls, the original Apex which showed it was a single story thatched roof building.
The toilet was around the corner in its own shed and the bucket was toilet shaped. They had a Nelson toilet put in as they got older.
The ground outside the house was a nightmare because there was so much klinker and stuff from when it was a forge.
The best part was, when the inside was totally gutted a family of bluetits used it to learn to fly. We only knew they were there because one of our cats would sit outside, staring up at the roof where the nest was.

These are great! We've just bought a house that partly dates back to about 1850. We're planning to do some renovations so I will make a point of ferreting about under floorboards and up chimneys. Hope I find something!

All we've found under our 1930's floorboards are old cigarette packets

Great thread

At my friend's house as a child when her parents split and her mum got a new house, bought from a prominent Jehovah's Witness, about a hundred watch tower magazines but underneath them , a load of rabbit foot good luck charms and porn mags

1960s house. Two 7” singles under the lino: a Bananarama one I can’t remember, plus The Eagles’ Hotel California.

Parents’ house, former village pub (1800s) - lots of green glass bottles and clay pipes in the garden, plus some small poison bottles. Also a lot of fossils, mostly ammonites and trilobites. In the walls some Victorian pennies, and in the dining room ceiling a hammer.
My first house (1920s): took up the ghastly bathroom carpet and found a large pair of pliers. No idea how they’d not noticed they were laying carpet over them!
My current house (1950s so not that old): half the kitchen ceiling came down due to a burst pipe so had to pull the other half down in order to put a new one up. Found a pristine Woodbines packet and a small glass jar of what is probably tobacco.

Victorian house- still have the original bell system in each room. It does feel a bit odd at times looking at it on the wall and thinking about people using it 150 years ago!

Also found original tiles on the hearth in two bedrooms when lifted the carpets.

@Cornishmumofone what a tally stick 😲😲

We found an Edwardian garden
roller when cutting back a very overgrown and brambly part of the garden

We found a garden tractor in a similar way, sold it on Ebay! Our house dates back to the 1640's. Love the history, not so keen on the damp.

Ah all these are so interesting

My parents lived in their house for more than 30 years before they found a small room hidden between the drying room and a cubbyhole...

I converted a barn that was built around 1850. It is stone with a timber roof structure. The roof was built from timbers used in a previous barn from the 1600's.
I have a well in the garden which is lined with lovey coursed stone.
I found a horse shoe buried inside which is huge, it must have come from a massive work horse used in ploughing or the like.

Our house is 1845-50 and we bought as a wreck. Had 11 layers of wallpaper back to the original varnished brown paper pieces at the bottom layer - not even made from wallpaper rolls - just big square pieces. When I stripped the (lead) paint off (with a mask) I found the builders signature in pencil on the staircase and a pornographic pencil drawing of a big breasted woman on one of the shutters! I suppose they thought nobody would ever see it. I have a photo of it somewhere. We also found the original gas lighting pipes and it still had brown Bakelite light switches - although there were no electrical sockets in the house at all! An old lady lived in it previously since at least the 1950s. We found old women's own magazines under carpet including advice on how to keep your man happy by dressing up for when he got home from work there was also a bath plumbed in in the kitchen. Very weird... it's a lovely house now though!!

We didn't find anything, but we had a visit from the local police within a few days of moving in, to reassure us that the previous owner would be incarcerated for a long time if they had anything to do with it, and the house and garden had been thoroughly searched before it was put on the market.

That was unexpected.