In today's installment of "weird and inexplicable shit we have found when doing up our house", I give you...

[ShowOfHands]

A mummified frog.

Add this to gaping holes literally papered over, bricked up empty spaces (making the room 15% smaller for no discernible reason), a live cable simply cut in half, secret notes, walls held up with cement and gravel and a room we didn't know we had.

Anybody else found anything weird while renovating?

Bkess

Downthisroad
That should say bless and it was for penis extension

Well I have read all 300 posts and I am very disappointed that not one of you has found Narnia yet!

@Lillibee4 it was 35 years ago, no internet then and no eBay. There were also a lot of old nail polishes. And much other tat.

We live in an old pub converted into a house. Not long after moving in, we were told that one of the locals loved the pub so much that when he died, they drilled a hole in the patio and poured his ashes in. Went outside to check and sure enough, the hole is still there. Obviously we will leave him to rest in peace, but it is a lovely sunny spot for an evening drink and we often go out to join him for a tipple in the summer.

We can also see on the old plans that there is a second cellar somewhere, but we haven't found the entrance to it yet.

I love reading this thread!

My DPs live in a victorian house (my childhood home) when they first moved in, my dad found a stack of old newspapers from the 1930s in the outhouse, along with old books, magazines, a bag of shoes, a leather briefcase, a small stool and other random things like tiles, pipes and some old tools etc. He kept some of the magazines and newspapers and even the stool but threw everything else! He has often said he wishes he had kept more of it but at the time he just wanted to get it cleared.

My Dps also found the original cast iron front gate in the back garden , it's quite a big gate but itwas partially covered by overgrown bushes. They restored and repainted it and put it back in its rightful place.

They also found things in the cellar, mainly junk but I'll find out if there were any goodies!

@CleverKatty I absolutely LOVE what I do! It's finding secret little stories of peoples lives when no other trace of them remains, and trying to piece things together. I mostly work on things people did as superstitions, but I'm not fussy. Anything that was important to someone still gets me grinning, every single day, even the grisliest stuff

sadeyedladyofthelowlandsea

Thanks for sharing, it’s fascinating reading about the finds at Oxburgh Hall.

I helped clear out the outbuildings of my DBs farm, there was a large box full of letters from a young man to his mother. Who must have been the widowed farmers wife. Sent from N Africa in one of the wars. The name of his home village was spelt differently at the time. I didnt read enough to get the era. Unfortunately I was the only one who wanted to keep & read the letters, & as they were a damp, smelt of mould, & would have taken ages to dry, .. they went on the bonfire.

they went on the bonfire

We inherited a friends flat when he died in his late 70s. When we were clearing it we found 500 porn dvds and 250 porn videos. He always seemed such a quite sort of man.

There will be a proper report written up on it at some point, but this twitter thread is a lovely little summary of what the archaeologist working on it found. My favourite is the Terry's All Gold! twitter.com/mjc_associates/status/1295459240593821697

The people who bought my late father's house very kindly contacted me via the estate agent to let me know they had found a box of diaries. They turned out to be my uncles and dated from 1952 until shortly before he died in 1995. They are those little pocket diaries with tiny writing and entries are like 'Sausages for tea. Berlin Wall went up.' I haven't got round to reading them all yet.

I've never found anything in a house I've moved into. Well unless you count child's socks etc behind radiators.

LOVE this thread. My son in law once lived in a house with a hidden room that had been bricked up, wasnt untill they decorated they found it. Big old creepy place.

A tobacco tin and a load of razor blades wrapped up and stuffed in the walls.

We moved in to a place that had been owned by one person since it was built in the 70s. He's passed away, and his estranged wife had cleared the house and sold it. When we moved in we discovered she'd forgotten to clear the loft! It was absolutely rammed with general loft stuff - bags of dust sheets and old towels, Xmas Dec's, pet beds, loads of craft/hobby stuff with dried out paints and broken bits. This was during 1st lockdown when all the tips were shut, we had to hire a skip, which we completely filled with all this stuff! We found out later from a neighbour that the old owner was a ceramics painter for Harrods. Sadly there weren't any bits of his work up there. But scrubbing the mould off the kitchen tiles I discovered they have hand painted Chinese style blue pictures on, which I quite like, so that's something.

Fascinating thread!

Ours isn't quite so exciting. Our builders took down the delightfully orange pine suspended ceiling in our kitchen and found a copy of The Sun newspaper from the early 1980s. Sadly they threw it in the skip and it was an unreadable, soggy mess by the time I got to it.

We also found kids' drawings on the floorboards with names like 'Debbie' and 'Jason' so I suspect these are from the 1970s. We live in a 1930s house and anything older is long gone (although we do have the original stained glass front door!).

About finding secret rooms: does anyone remember the children's mystery on TV in the 70s about the kids that find a secret room in a house? They realised that they had more windows looking from the outside than they could count inside. The hidden room had a skeleton on an ancient, cobwebby bed ... I've never forgotten it!

The Clifton House Mystery

Sally

I don’t remember that tv programme. But I do wonder why there are so many bricked up secret rooms about!!

The idea of a hidden usable room behind a bookcase is one thing but to actually take the time to brick up a room, why would someone do that? It can’t be anything good can it

I forgot to mention, I'm a dreamer of secret/hidden rooms too!

In fact, had another such dream last night - I always, in the dream, wonder how I've missed the room before, and then wake up all hopeful only to realise it's just a dream and there isn't really a hidden room after all :(

In my parents old house (we moved out when I was 16 in 2014) there were many weird things it was an ex council house built around the second world war time or just after we think, when stripping the dangerous woodchip walls we found an old mural of a ship from that period-ish and was clearly a childs nursery, in my room, we lived with it for about a year. Carvings in the walls from the seventies of initials and dates, a fire that was apparently capped off around 2000 had bird skeletons found behind the boarded up fire place in 2012-2013.Weird things buried in the garden like netting, old cutlery , picture frames etc and really old fashioned christmas decorations and clothing that was at the back of the attic that had been left there

Not sure if anyone remembered me mentioning I have a current mystery - two small windows not leading to any room.
Well I climbed a ladder at the weekend and with some stretching can see white board behind them. Tracing back from some pipes I can see they originally looked into a bathroom but were boarded over and tiled. In fairness they'd be at foot level so I guess that's fair enough.
Sorry not the most interesting of finds

A pink thong behind the old boiler, discovered when we had it replaced.
Not mine.

Apart from long rambling notes about heroin addiction, bolts on the outside of the bedroom door, our builders found a live bullet. Stupidly, they threw it in the skip before I could see it.

There was only one previous owner, a perfectly respectable couple in their sixties. I still see them around and I'd love to ask them:

"Oi! Who fired the bullet? Who's the smack head?"