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?

@Stovetopespresso I don't think it's a priest hole as it's only Georgian but i think it might be something to do with some riots in the 1700s. There's a rumour the pub down the road has a tunnel too. Our house was built for the Dean of the Protestant Cathedral and it may have been for him to get to work without facing the mob? No one is really sure.
It's probably just a georgian cess pit after all that!

There were quite a few plastic pigeons in the cellar when we moved in to this house.

Ours had bricked up fireplaces, original doors and spindles on the banisters covered over with chipboard, walls sided with newspaper, names written on various covered over things and an old glass drinks bottle with a note inside bricked up in the kitchen fireplace.

We did find an original cast iron fire with slate surround boarded up in a bedroom. It is now restored in our living room.

Boxes containing cremated dogs (I hope dogs anyway....). Two pewter alter chalices. A rubber mouse.

Digging up the garden. Knuckledusters. And they seemed like such nice people we bought from......

An Anderson shelter buried in the garden

Once when stripping wallpaper in an old house we uncovered a whole wall mural from we thought the 1920s, it was fantastic and very "TinTin" in style. Sadly because of the plans for the room it had to be painted over, I think someone took pictures of it beforehand but it was over 15 years ago so no idea where they'd be.

In my current house the most surprising hidden thing I found was a big dustbin well hidden behind a big bush in the garden... absolutely full to the brim of... DOG SHIT

Replacing my tiny door. Already measured up with new frame. Removing the old frame and casting discovered 4 other frames hidden.

The door code meant dud think my door was non standard size when measuring up. Thankfully they were able to make y new door fit by building a new frame. To hold the new one.

We found a gun. Wrapped in newspaper from the 70s and hidden under floorboards.

@NaughtipussMaximus

I dew sometimes I live in a house and find extra rooms I didn’t know we had. Where is your extra room, OP?

Me too

@WizardOfAus

We found a gun. Wrapped in newspaper from the 70s and hidden under floorboards.

What did you do with it?!

These are all great!

We've found an army camp bed, not sure if it's WW1 or 2, a large metal trunk and a coin from 1807. The coin was under the floorboards and we've been told this was often done to date the house. We know it was definitely in existence in 1827 so 1807 sounds reasonable. Also a load of very old whiskey bottles when digging over the garden and the metal parts for a huge poly tunnel.

@GingerAndTheBiscuits

We took it to the police and they told us they would have it destroyed!

@WizardOfAus I wonder if they did any kind of ballistics test on it? Maybe I’ve been watching too much CSI

I sometimes dream about finding an extra room in the house too.

When DH was pulling down the kitchen ceiling in his flat he found the original cast iron fireplace stored there. Luckily he found a corner of it first and so was very careful but it could have been really dangerous.

I also dream about secret rooms - how did you find an extra room, where was it?

We found a nude photo of the previous (male) owner of the house behind the kitchen cupboards obviously shoved down there years before (it was when he was in 40s sometime in the 80s we guessed but didn't want to look too hard)

My dad took out a fitted wardrobe to found it had been put in to cover huge cracks in the wall (there was faux wood panelling on the other side of the wall to cover the other side) which hid the fact the house had subsidence because it turns out it didn't have any foundations (built in the 60s so definitely should have had them)

A Donny Osmund calendar, a full English breakfast in a tin, some pipe work from when the far end of the house was a milking parlour (1900), a bricked up doorway to our neighbour's cottage, and cat faeces... much cat faeces!

The inner frame of a piano buried in the soil behind a barn.

Another one who dreams of finding extra rooms in the house- I’d known they were there but forgotten about them and rediscover them in the dream.

Not my house but, when stripping wallpaper a friend found a up boarded up doorway and stairs up to rooms in the attic!

My parents' house has yielded a box of old coins stuffed into the roof thatch (mostly Victorian pennies), and a Boer war era rifle shoved into the roof beams of the garden shed.

I'm seethingly jealous of some friends of mine who've recently moved into and renovated a house, and found a boarded off (for no apparent reason) space large enough to fit a big comfy armchair and a decent sized bookcase in it.

I hear you OP. My last house was a 1890’s terrace that has been remodelled over time. Well. Every time we went to either improve something or had to have a repair it was a total nightmare and ended up 10x the job you thought it would be for exactly the reasons you describe.

‘Character’ is a massive red flag to me with estate agents. Good news is was lovely once we fixed it all :)

May the force.

God im so envious of some of these. Ive always lived in old house. My current cottage is 400 years old and ive found absolutely nothing.

[quote GingerAndTheBiscuits]@WizardOfAus I wonder if they did any kind of ballistics test on it? Maybe I’ve been watching too much CSI [/quote]
I was picturing that we’d helped solved a long-forgotten murder case. But the police couldn’t have been less interested.

I love threads like this!

Same @KeepWashingThoseHands. We are in a 1920s townhouse and I am scared every time we do some renovating or decorating. I need a few months to build myself up. Everything ends up being much worse than you think. Slanted floors and bowed walls

We haven’t found anything really interesting apart from a nice wooden floor in the living room that someone has varnished with what looks like ronseal fence paint and original black and white tiles in the porch. I am hoping after reading this thread that we might find more hidden.