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?

Lots of bullet holes in the basement walls. An overseas police officer's badge which had fallen behind a radiator. I've seen a number of "secret rooms" constructed by owners who preferred not to put money they'd acquired in the bank. My favourite was a substantial secret basement accessed through a hidden door behind a fake wall in a cupboard. It was the best. It was a modern house with no reason to have a basement. Secret rooms in the body of the house are usually easily discovered by comparing the external measurements of the house to the rooms.

A rather decrepit Victorian range cooker, in the cellar. Would love to have it restored at some point, and the cellar returned to being a kitchen.

A ‘secret’ full height cupboard in back of the built in wardrobes - nothing exciting in it though
A perfectly preserved dead fox, curled up ‘asleep’ on the piles of wood in the shed
And finally a Gurkha Kukri slid behind the sink pipe work in the downstairs loo.....like this one

.

We found a beautiful spinning wheel in the attic of a house we bought. It was a long time after we moved in, because the attic was difficult to access, and we no longer had a forwarding address for the people before us, so I still have it, in the corner of my living room.

A ceramic tortoise where you could lift off the shell as a sort of lid. Was it an ashtray? Found when ripping out the old back boiler and putting gas CH in. Had to keep it in the house, felt too weird to throw away. No idea how old it was. Left it there when we moved out..

[quote Orangesarenottheonlyfruit]@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![/quote]
You don't live in Arundel do you? The town has lots of tunnels leading to the Castle, it has a Cathedral too.

The house we own now is the newest house we've ever lived in. Built in 1931. The absolutely appalling bodge jobs from years ago means that simple tasks become a mammoth effort. We've replaced the roof, including joists and when we did the bathroom, we ripped out the floor and ceiling and took it back to brick as the previous owner had made such a hash of it and caused huge water damage. It will all be worth it eventually. We've found some original features at least and we did know we were buying a project.

We took up the carpet in the snug a while ago and found two holes in the floorboards, a perfect window to the space under the house and the soil below.

The secret room is really not as exciting as it sounds. The house was extended years ago and the extension incorporates the old toilet which was, once upon a time, in the garden. Only they bricked round it and pretended it wasn't there. So hidden in the corner of our kitchen was a downstairs toilet with terrible wallpaper and plugged up with newspapers from the 1950s.

The notes were a bit sad. Like a diary but in loose leaf, shoved into a cavity. You can trace the writer's journey from marriage to new baby via an abusive marriage and a desperate wish to escape.

Loving reading about other people's finds.

I do like an old house. I find it strangely comforting to see the evidence of people who lived here before. Hoping our next one will be Victorian or older.

I too dream of secret rooms. I think it's pretty common.

I love this thread and am jealous we haven’t found anything of interest in our home!

my mum lived in a house with a secret room, they felt there was something weird about the layout so put a towel in each of the windows, and when they went outside...there was one window with no towel in!
secret priest hole half way up a wall with no stairs to it. God knows how they got up there to feed him, a ladder? entrance hidden by a wall hanging?

Our house had been extended and one exterior wall was huge and flat but inside there was 3 window reveals, no windows though. We got permission to extend on the ground floor so we asked permission (listed building) to open the windows on the first floor.
We found original frames, one of which had the carpenters name, age and address in pencil also the year that they were put there 1853. They had never had glass in them, weren't painted but just bricked up.
The bricks were tiny and hand finished by children, they had tiny hand prints visible. We've kept the bricks and frame and they are in a frame themselves. They'll stay with the house. It's a reminder of earlier times and child labour.

A pantry, two weeks or so after we moved in. Thought it was another outside door, then one day realised that the walls didn’t line up.

21 jackdaw skeletons in a chimney.

A rod, the sort they used to ‘discipline’ children with, on top of a cupboard.

I found a mummified bat.

I also found some scraps of newspaper under some floorboards dating back to the 1970's... fascinating read, including an article on equal pay for women and how the situation was changing... shame it hasn't changed enough, 50 years on!

@OakleyStreetisnotinChelsea

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.

We have left our names and the date under things we have done in the house. I like the idea of someone later on finding them 😀

In the loft we found an old camp bed and in the airing cupboard was an old-fashioned back brace. Not particularly exciting, but strange.

great thread! I too dream of finding extra rooms, and it is the best dream. Always through a closet door, and there is a whole house, fully furnished but a wee bit dusty. I'm so happy when I find it, and can't wait to get it all clean and sparkling for my DS and family to move into.

Last house we found a locked safe sunk into concrete, built into a cupboard and carpeted over, so we didn't find it for many years. I did a thread on that one - AND included what we found when we finally got it opened. A Mexican coin on a chain (worthless really) and a dirty napkin. Cost a fortune to open it, but I could not bear to walk away with it still locked. Just. In. Case.

i found a mummified frog in the bathroom when i moved into my flat! the worst part of this story is that i rent. i don’t think they did much of a deep clean after the previous tenant...

An old RAF uniform and a stash of M/M porn in the shed of my old house.

A hatch in the floor that led to a basement I didn't know existed. Had a visit from a bad ghost after this (never made the connection until years later)

Ooh. Tell us more about the ghost, sleepyhead

We found a room behind our kitchen. Lived in London so reckoned it was about £20k of space the prior owners had just plastered over the door?! Wtf?!

A colleague found a wall full of coal...

@goldierocks

I finally finished renovating my Victorian terrace a couple of years ago. The lady I bought the house from was born in it and raised her family here; it had only been owned by that one family.

The bathroom was originally downstairs. It had seven layers of tiles on top of each other. I gained almost a foot of space all the way round the room once I'd stripped them off!

When I viewed the house I thought the sitting room walls were dark mustard yellow. On moving in day, the pictures were gone & the wall behind them was white...the colour was due to nicotine staining.

I uncovered a glorious original Victorian staircase that had been completely boxed over...just why?!

The front path was Minton tiled....they'd poured concrete over them. I tried unsuccessfully to rescue the tiles (sob).

I found at least 10 different names on hand-drawn height charts in the three bedrooms (behind many layers of wallpaper).

When I replaced carpets, the floorboards were covered in copies of the local newspaper dated between 1901 - 1947. I lost HOURS to reading through them all!

Practically every original feature had either been removed or covered up. I loved the ceiling heights and huge thick walls. It was a real labour of love putting all the original features back in....only took 27 years!

Weren't they boxed to protect them? Or to modernise the look of the house? I think it's lovely they have been hidden rather than ripped out. Shame about the Minton tiles :(

We've only found some interesting paper when we have been renovating here. When we start to do the full refurb I wonder what we might uncover in the floorboards etc It's only a 1935 ex council house and as far as I know we are the 4th inhabitants.

My parents rented a flat above a shop in the 70’s
One day my dad found Victorian receipts and book keeping from when the shop below sold hardware like candles and nails
He donated the whole lot to the castle museum in York

I found used condoms and a traffic cone under the stairs in my last house (student let-the landlord hadn’t bothered to clean it)

In this house we found a blackboard and a toddlers swimming float-gutted I’ve not found the cellar yet!

In previous 1898 house, a bricked up outdoor toilet, attached to house but I had assumed it was the end of the kitchen, some antique looking anatomical charts on proper parchment, and 1940s dated newspaper stuffed in the walls.
Current 1850s house... Original floor hidden under vile carpet, and original fireplace and window sill 'bulked out' with roof tiles and wood, then plastered over. Have only gutted 2 rooms so far, so will be interesting to see what else there is!!

Our house has hidden compartments everywhere. We’ve been here 14 years now and still find them! There’s a lockable compartment in the floor of our bedroom, a hidden cupboard behind an inbuilt bookcase and even a lockable one in the kitchen baseboard! No idea why! People who visit (when they could) are fascinated by them!