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?

Not us but PIL, when renovating their new home they took up the laminate in the reception room to find a beautiful original parquet floor underneath.

For some reason garlictwist’s fear of finding more rooms which need cleaning in a new house, has really tickled me 😆

We found the contents of someone's kitchen in the loft dating from 1986 (diary was left) literally pots, pans, cutlery even kitchen drawers. However, under that we found a 14 foot long tree trunk! We had to cut it in to 3 parts to get it out so god knows how it ever got up there.

When an acquaintance renovated her new house, her builders gutted the entire place. Buried under the kitchen floor, they found a a voodoo doll with photographs of a person's face & pins stuck to it. It freaked the builders out so they got a priest to dispose of the doll. Then the entire house had to be blessed before the builders would continue with the renovation.

last house (victorian terrace) we found 30 doors in the cellar.
lots of newspapers stuffed in the window frames. the back of the house windows were blown out by a ww2 bomb, those were 1941 editions; front of house 1890.

anytime a builder gave a big sigh and said 'original to the house' I got a nervous tick...

The most exciting thing found when me and ex did up a house was the old weights from the sash windows.

We found a witch bottle! Whilst rebuilding the bay window at the front of our (mostly 17th century) house. I didn't know what it was at the time, it was a small bottle with children's teeth and a nail and a twig in some murky liquid and then sealed with wax. It was only a few years later that I found out about witch bottles and realised. I made the builder build it back in to the same place though.

I’ve just googled what dreaming about finding extra rooms means, the top result is so spot on for Mumsnet!

“The Dream Doctor says the extra-room dream is associated with “a rediscovery of lost aspects of the self,” noting that it's often experienced by women “who have scarified personal hobbies and passions (painting, music, desire to own a small business) for the responsibility of parenting.””

We have a cellar and on the door one of the previous owners had painted his dead wife's name over and over in red paint. We keep painting over it but the red glows through eerily.

The same dead wife used to be an amateur painter. 20 years after we moved in we found a huge stash of her paintings in the loft. We were wondering how on earth to contact the family of the previous owners (assuing the husband had died by then) when as the most wonderful coincidence one of the sons turned up at our door as a Hermes driver. He said 'I was brought up here' and explained who he was and we said 'Oh we have your mother's paintings!'.

(and gave them to him obviously!). he was overwhelmed.

We were fixing up a very old property in France and found a Jew’s hole hidden behind a wall in the attic. It had clothes, workbooks, a bed, and lots of religious books some of which had notes from his family hand written inside. We tried to trace family members but never got anywhere with it

I too have the extra/hidden room recurring dream.

@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!

It was a real "thing" in the 1970s to reduce decorative Victorian/Georgian houses to really plain, utility style (but frequently with Artex ceilings, ffs!) I visited a house that should have been a nice 1920s Georgian brick semi and it was like you describe - fireplaces covered over, stair balustrade turned into solid sheet plywood, 4 panel doors removed or covered in hardboard to make them plain and solid - argh!

Ended up buying a nice 1930s brick semi in the same area that hadn't been adulterated in the same way - was so much nicer with all the original features in place!

The house I grew up in was a monastery in 1066. There are monks buried under the dining room floor. The house is mentioned in the Domesday Book!

My FIL is in a very old house. He has to live in just one part, to save heating it all. In his living room (the informal one), the TV is in front of a door that is never used. It actually leads to a Victorian doctors surgery, complete with waiting room, exam rooms and all the furniture. It has not been touched since it closed in the 1800's. I don't know why he never incorporated it in to the house, I guess they already had enough space, as it's huge. He's about to put the house on the market, I'm not sure what people are going to make of this!

Prior to my new build I have only lived in 1979s ex council houses so not much if excitement but in my first house my ex found an original 1970s Paddington bear in the loft. We sold him on eBay for about £50.

Some earlier owners had also celebrated their bad taste by writing their initials on everything with dates and love hearts, including in the cement for the badly built porch they'd added on.

My mums 1950s bungalow had some beautiful kitchen tiles from the 70s I'd have kept them as I loved them!

@Orangesarenottheonlyfruit

Really like your username
Is it inspired by that female Author Jeanette winterson about her very quiky life story on being a child christian evangelical orator at her local church and rebelling when she was older teenager by coming out as a lesbian.
I think there was a drama tv series.

I like your post thread too
Very quiky/and very original too,
also interesting that you found a tunnel from your house leading to a cathedral wow.😕😀
.

Not extraordinary at all but I loved it. When we bought our last house (1930s) tucked away in a corner by the boiler, there was a tiny gold kangaroo lapel pin stuck into the wall. It was in what would originally have been the kitchen but by then was the utility room. When we eventually painted the room I put the kangaroo back in its original place.

We lived there 18 years and moved out 15 years ago and when we moved I left the kangaroo behind but I sometimes think of it and wish I'd brought it to our new house and found it a new home by the boiler here.

@SummerBlondey that’s insane !!! When it goes for sale please come back and link to the listing !!

Nothing very thrilling, but a bag of toys and bridesmaid dress in the attic, belonging to the sellers ex- girlfriend? They were obviously childhood toys so felt a bit sad binning them.

@LunaHeather I dream about secret rooms too.

We're boarding up our under-stairs cupboard soon and I'm definitely going to leave something creepy in it before we do.

One home we bought had a definite outward curve on the outside walls each side of our patio doors. We discovered when upgrading the heating that the lounge had alcoves that had been utilised at some point for heating pipes and plastered over. We couldn’t afford to restore them at the time and boarded over them again. We’ve sold the house since and never thought to tell the buyers.

Our home now has an old, very basic stone sink which we discovered. It’s been covered by a wooden frame to make a window seat.
We think there is another sink under our bedroom window as a crude stone spout comes out of the outside wall. It’s also damp.

These are all so exciting! I was hoping for things like this my house was built in 1901.. however, the most I found was a pair of the last tenants shoes..

@SummerBlondey

My FIL is in a very old house. He has to live in just one part, to save heating it all. In his living room (the informal one), the TV is in front of a door that is never used. It actually leads to a Victorian doctors surgery, complete with waiting room, exam rooms and all the furniture. It has not been touched since it closed in the 1800's. I don't know why he never incorporated it in to the house, I guess they already had enough space, as it's huge. He's about to put the house on the market, I'm not sure what people are going to make of this!

I would be calling the local museum first!

Like many I’ve done a fair bit of covid diy.

When sealing something up, stud wall, new floor boards I try to put that day’s newspaper in.

I sometimes write the odd world headline on the back of boards etc.