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?

@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?

I also have the same recurring dream. I think it's just because I want a bigger house!

I long for an old house to find relics in. Friends of ours had an outstanding Georgian house with all the original fittings, a huge garden with hedges all around the outside and a gap between (wondering if they sold to PP!) a carriage house on the property, a turret, an Anderson shelter and a little copse. A dream for the DC and absolutely stunning. They never managed to quite do it up though, as it was very expensive. Also had the original doorbell which you pulled a metal lever and it rang an actual bell, and little light bulb fixtures over the kitchen door connected to switches in every room, presumably to summon maids.

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!

We viewed a Victorian house like this when we were looking to buy our first house. The old lady who was selling it after the death of her DH proudly told us how he'd 'modernised' the house, by putting up false ceilings to cover up all the 'old-fashioned' mouldings, boxed in the staircase and put in new floors. The whole house was dark and gloomy, everything he'd done needed to be ripped out and we decided we didn't want a fixer-upper, so we didn't buy it.

Wow, all this sounds amazing. The journal pages sound especially fascinating, if sad. Could you put them together in some way and donate them to a feminist project?

Victorian terraced house. Original slate roof had long ago been replaced with heavy concrete tiles. After we moved in my husband investigated the loft and found it full of rubbish from many previous owners, and right at the back were all the original slates, mostly broken. No wonder the roof timbers were sagging!

One builder we had asked about some boxing in high up on the kitchen wall. We had pipes all over the place, some boxed in, some not, and we'd always assumed this bit of boxing covered some unsightly join. No. He removed the boxing and there, sticking into the plaster, was a cold chisel. We can only assume that some botcher decades earlier got the chisel stuck, couldn't get it out, so hid it inside this totally unnecessary bit of boxing in. I wish we'd taken a picture, but it was before the days of camera phones.

We found an armchair in the loft, next to the old cold water tank. Stuffed down the side of the chair was a very dog eared porn mag and the water tank was full of used tissues not envy!

Barry Bucknell is the chap responsible for all the boxing in:

Bucknell often demonstrated techniques to 'modernise' older properties, most typically using cheap materials including hardboard and plywood to cover up architectural detail such as period doors and fireplaces, which at that time were considered unfashionable. This earned Bucknell the moniker 'Bodger' Bucknell. By the 1990s, some critics[who?] argued that he was largely responsible for millions of home owners altering their properties to a style that, in turn, is now considered dated again.

My grandfather was a devotee and I feel extremely sorry for whoever bought my grandparents old houses!

We live in a 1970s build and even in that short time there was an amazing number of bodge jobs that have required rectifying. Steel plumbing pipes, no RSJ where there should have been one, comedy wiring and a concrete toilet have been some of the "highlights".

The house we live in now was built in the 1950's and was groundsmans house adjoining sports fields owned by a local large newspaper printers/publishers, and backing onto woods. Despite living in the area for many years this house had escaped my notice as it was so hidden away.
Long story short Robert Maxwell took over the printers and turfed the groundsman out and used this "tucked away" house as a "love nest" (polite way of putting it).
We found all sorts as we bought the house complete with contents from the administrators after Maxwell was gone. Large mirrors that were the exact size of the bedroom ceilings down the side of the house !
A collection of books including one about a man who faked his own death by jumping off a boat, always had me wondering that one!

@SummerBlondey your FIL’s house sounds amazing. What part of the country is it in? The Thackray Museum of Medicine would be very, very interested in the contents of the surgery. thackraymuseum.co.uk/

A friend recently moved house and found two wasps nests in the loft full of dead wasps.

Boobs There’s a current project underway to find witch bottles
www.mola.org.uk/witch-bottles-concealed-and-revealed

A golliwog brooch in the old cubby hole!!

Not much else other than an old Danielle Steele collection, those 60's spikey glass ceiling pendant lights and very lairy patterned carpet also not seen since the 60's.

Talking of things found in lofts, did anyone see the episode (years ago) of Antiques Roadshow where a woman brought in a beautiful gem studded bracelet?

She was asked where it came from (as they do) and she recounted the story perfectly happily that her DH was a tradie f some sort and went into a customer's loft, found it and pocketed it.

It was worth about 2k apparently and i was gobsmacked that she apparently did not realise her DH was a thief.

We had the house re-wired shortly after moving in. When the electricians moved the insulation in the loft they found lots of mummified mice and droppings between the joists - seems like there was a very bad infestation at some point! But they also found a roll of cine-film, I held it up to the light to see what was on it, lots of well dressed people outside a church and a lady holding a baby so I guess a christening, looking at what they are wearing, I'd say from the 1970s. Sadly house had been empty for years as the previous owners had died and was sold on behalf of a distant relation by solicitors, so never got to pass it on.

A scrapbook showing the house being renovated - I think in the 70s (looks like that might have been when it got an indoor loo).

Some of the walls had holes with bits of newspaper stuffed in them - as far as we could make out from the content, dating from WW2.

@VonWeasel

My sister found a skeleton whilst renovating the kitchen. That slightly delayed the renovations!

You CANT leave us hanging like that!!

Was it a murder victim or an archaeological find? Did anyone manage to find out why it was there and who it was?

I know someone who found grenades buried in their garden... turns out the person who lived there during WW2 worked at the local explosives factory, though whether they had dreams of leading the local resistance if it came to it, or a more sinister reason for teaching the odd bit home, I don't know.

We found a baby's christening gown, a bonnet and small bone rattle above a doorway into a small bedroom. We did some research into previous owners and a couple had lived here in the early 1900s who had lost their only baby. We put them back after fixing the area they were in.

We've found jewellery, a bundle of notes between teenaged sweethearts, a silver hairbrush with a locket nestled in the bristles wrapped in cloth and hidden on a secret shelf beneath a cupboard in the pantry, and a set of spreader bars...

The bones pre dated the building of the house and were half covered by the external walls. The police set up a crime scene in the kitchen but after sending some of the leg bones away for dating they were deemed too old to be of further interest - I think they died 70+ years ago but not sure how.

Whenever we replace the flooring in one of the rooms at work ( an old detached house built in 1910) we uncover the newspapers used to cover the floorboards. They were obviously placed onto freshly varnished boards and are fixed on them forever. They date from 1941/42 and are really well preserved. The building is a dental surgery so the floors are boarded then vinyl floor placed over. I suppose they are unearthed every ten years or so.
There is also a beautiful parquet floor in the hallway. Rather than lifting it and replacing it during recent work, we have boarded it so it is there for someone to discover in the future. Not much else is left of the original features but there are still a few chimneys that might reveal secrets in the future.
During recent work we found 1970s graffiti on an old bricked up fireplace suggesting there was someone bricked up behind it. I reassured the builders that it was likely to be my old bosses sense of humour.

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

@ren101 chest expander?
www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/spenby-vintage-chest-expander-269829572

On stripping the wall paper in a house I found the note from the previous decorator.
Reasonable size room. Took me 4 days to get back to bare walls.
"she has done all the easy bits and left me to soak of the difficult parts. I don't love her"

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!

As PP said, at the very least give the old furniture and medical equipment to a museum, or even sell it. That stuff is always popular and could be worth quite a lot.
It would be horrible if new owner just chucked it in a skip.

Only decent thing I found in ours was an original round metal wood burner in the shed. I can't lift it as it's so heavy. Really rusty but I know I can clean it up. Never going to use it but like the thought of it being back in the house on display somewhere.

@Backtobacktheyfacedeachother Exactly like that - only a bit rustier!

@Whatamesssss - the mind boggles! 😆 Not sure if the pickled onions or the porn mags were the most disturbing!