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 like your post
Just a thought maybe if you put a article story in your local newspaper about the woman who died young and her artwork
Cause she died sadly young,she could still have living family who would would appreciate her art work endeavors as a student to rember her by.
(similar to a unausaul family heirloom type of idea too.

Also its quite interesting story as people are allways intrigued by other people lives too.

Supermarkets are allways full of those types of true life peoples stories,magazines on their shelves.

When DH and bought our first house my dad gave us his old DIY book he'd been given by his dad. It was full of gems on how to get rid of those "dated old fashioned features"

Thanks to that book though I just knew that when we bought a 1920s semi years later we'd find beautiful bannisters and original internal doors hidden under the plain doors and stairs. We also found lovely original fireplace tiles in the floor boards under the carpets too.

Whoever bought my grandparents house would have similar discoveries. He had spent his retirement "improving" his house. Just goes to show that modern doesnt always mean better.

@ShowOfHands

Really good post idea thread op.
especially with lockdowns need to have refreshing distraction,escapism.
thank you
Much appreciated.😀

What's with all the papered over holes in the walls? We found some too (house is about 1800).

Our floors have a definite slant upstairs. You can't play marbles.

Otherwise nothing exciting but some nasty surprises due to bad DIY

big dustbin well hidden behind a big bush in the garden... absolutely full to the brim of... DOG SHIT

what did you do with that?!

@slavetothenhs us too! not envy!

Why do people do that?! Our current house was full of "surprises" when we moved I didnt allow the kids (under 3) in the garden for ages until we dealt with that, the chicken shed, the brambles, growing through plastic garden furniture, the poisonous trees and rotten decking!!

We ve also had live wires, shelves drilled into gas pipes, a makeshift heating system running from a woodburner, a beautiful bowl shaped modern sink, expensive make but mounted an old 70s kitchen cupboard in the bathroom. The people who had this house were weird!!

This is good thread, I'm just thinking I could write a book on some of the things we've encountered when doing houses over the years!

OP pls post pic of mummified frog and let us know what the secret notes say.

@Happyhappyday

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...

Stories like this always make me think of Christie who boarded up the bodies of his victims at 10 Rillington Place. Sorry.

Interesting thread. I haven’t found much but someone I know bought a house off an old guy and under the floorboards was a load of what he called ‘ladyboy porn’.

A guy my DP works with just bought a house, could see it had lowered ceilings so he removed them, to find that hidden behind this and the walls was severe fire damage! Turns out there had been a serious fire in the house and all evidence was covered over rather than fixed, beams burned through and all. I think lawyers are now involved.

We managed to date the last time the electrics were done in our house by a newspaper and a flyer for a school fair found in the walls. Made sense of the lack of earth - no earth on the metal light switches we thought. No, in fact, no earth in the whole house. Electricity board got round sharpish due to a 2 year old and an insulin dependent diabetic in the house.

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!

It is sad, in a way, but at that time more women were going out to work and still had all the housework to do. Also, many houses were still heated by coal fires which created dust which had to be cleaned every day. It must have seemed like a brilliant idea to cover everything over with flat wipe-clean surfaces and get a nice three bar electric heater instead of the coal fire. At least the original features were only boxed in waiting to be rediscovered rather than stripped out and taken to the tip.

In my first flat the previous resident had mezuzahs (scrolls) on the doorways. We liked having that reminder of him and all his family who had lived there and I hope the next resident kept them.

Friends of ours found a pile of porn mags, a jar of pickled onions and half a bottle of whisky in their loft when they moved in... 😬

We've not found anything exciting in the house yet (but I live in hope as it's a total doer upper) but our DCs found a whole extra bit of garden after we'd moved in.

They disappeared behind the hedge and I assumed they'd snuck into next door so was pretty cross and called them back. They were adamant that they were on an adventure. Eventually they popped out at the opposite end of the garden. Turns out that there's a gap about 1.5 metres wide between the hedge we can see in the garden and the boundary fence - all the way around the garden. One day we might reclaim the space, but at the moment it keeps the DCs busy for hours!

We also found a huge garden roller in an old brick coal bunker. The plan is to display that in the garden one day.

We finished an extensive project with builders just before lockdown. They found a massive mummified rat and enough shit to be labelled as 'rat city' with tapes of Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years buried in it.

There were also five ceilings above the kitchen with both water and fire damage. The bathroom had six layers of tiles on the floor. The previous owners had also bricked up a separate doorway which the builders couldn't remove without extensive remodelling so they left it.

We were also left a corkscrew man where the corkscrew was huge part of his anatomy. We've kept him as a joke.

We also had such weak exterior walls due to poor decking choices that you could push the bricks out like Jenga. It was terrifying. They eventually dried out and were sealed up properly again.

@SummerBlondey I second calling a museum too.

Depending where you are places like the Black Country Museum and Beamish but whole houses and rebuild them in their sites. But even other museums may be interested in the surgery contents.

We uncovered a fireplace in our 100 year old cottage and there was an old chessboard wedged in there.
Also lots of interesting glass bottles buried in the garden. Have managed to salvage some as they weren’t broken. Really unique shapes.
And loads of old fishing rods hidden in an outbuilding (which had cracks in the bricks big enough for my entire arm). That got pulled (fell) down pretty quickly.

@drspouse

In my first flat the previous resident had mezuzahs (scrolls) on the doorways. We liked having that reminder of him and all his family who had lived there and I hope the next resident kept them.

That’s nice. We have some symbols carved into the edge of our doors. I always wondered if they were religious.

@2018SoFarSoGreat

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.

A house in your dreams represents your life, I understand - an old shabby one means you're unhappy with your current situation, and a smart new one means things are going well. So a hidden extra room might mean you wish to add something extra to your life. Take heed of what's in that extra dream room, as it might hint at what's missing in your life.

We too found a locked safe in the floor (in a very inconvenient place) but haven't tried to get it opened yet. How much did yours cost to open, please?

We have been renovating our Victorian terrace for six months now and have found loads of interesting things.

Namely, on day two my partner found a gun on top of one of the built in wardrobes. A really skinny shot gun sort of thing. We think it is a ‘rat gun’. It is in working condition.

We also found loads of papers from different decades under the carpet. Coincidentally, one of the papers was reporting about my dad’s cousin’s boxing match in the 80s. I loved looking at the prices of houses and cars in them.

We found a full chimney breast in our bedroom and a corner one in the bathroom that had been covered up - I was over the moon about this. We also had layer upon layer of tiles and plaster in the bathroom. There are also dated notes on the walls (with very bad grammar), such as ‘Ant was hear 1984’.

Last week, in the void under the house, we found some ancient looking exercise equipment. Sort of like metal spring resistance bands.

Early Victorian, detached Villa style property in Richmond Surrey.

Hastily repaired bomb damage with nonmatching bricks and charred roof timbers obviously salvaged from a bombsite. Slightly rusty revolver and two boxes of ammunition in the loft. Sexually explicit graffiti on the wall of what was the servant's bedroom. Boarded over connecting door from the master bedroom. All the doors are hung the wrong way round ( hinged on the right ) apart from the attic bedrooms. Signs of a fire in the basement. Fireplace hidden behind a wardrobe. Original tiled hallway uncovered.

My husband used to own what he thought was an L-shaped ground floor flat but walking round the outside it was quite clearly square-shaped. He checked with the neighbours upstairs to see if they owned a part of the ground floor, but they didn't.
Eventually after lots of knocking on the walls he knocked through and found a huge space thick with cobwebs like ceiling to floor curtains. He cleared it out and in the middle was a very old deck chair with cigarette packets from the 1920s or 1930s next to it on the floor and two mounds of earth about 6 ft long.
He cleared out the space - it was massive - and turned it into two additional bedrooms. I moved in for a while when we first got together and before he sold up. I always questioned him on how far he dug down into the mounds and was never 100% reassured that it was deep enough to be sure!

When my parents renovated their old house they found one of the builder's contracts written on the back of a wooden sliding door that hadn't been used for about a century.

"John Millward to do build addition to house for $5 and the big white horse."