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?

Moved into a Victorian house that had been built for a master mariner, in the coal house we found a large tin filled with buttons from all his uniforms.

The same family had lived in the house since it was built we were only the 2nd owners.

Then things started to move, go missing and other unexplainable things.....I was never frightened though!

We have a window inside an interior wall!!! Discovered when we were having some electrical work. We now have to remember not to drill in that wall!!!

@BoobsOnTheMoon

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.

A while ago I heard a podcast about a woman who records all the incidences of people finding things like that in their houses. Things like witch bottles, children’s and animals. What she found interesting was that every single person had kept the item and either returned it to where they had found it or put it on display. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would do anything else personally.

@slavetothenhs

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

@slavetothenhs I'm sure you're trying to erase the memory of it, but may I ask just how one gets rid of something like that?

I lived in a very old house.My mother decided to take the very old fireplace out.Written in the plaster was the message." I forgot my sandwiches today" bloody annoyed.Bert.1883.I have thought of him a lot

A 1970’s wedding photo. Quite large and in an elaborate frame.

@bondgirl76

That reminded me so much of my Dad who recently died. He did a lot of carpentry and would always leave a message for posterity and they were always mundane. I think it made him laugh, the idea of someone somewhere in the future reading it.

We found some beautiful patterned floor tiles in the porch under a manky old carpet

a mate of mine found a 4 foot high Madonna and Child wearing football scarf in the attic

@godmum56

a mate of mine found a 4 foot high Madonna and Child wearing football scarf in the attic

My Mum and her friends often talk about this (usually after a few glasses of wine!). They are all Catholic and inherited various saint and Our Lady statues from their parents. They don't want to display them but also don't know what to do with them because noone else would want them and their upbringing makes them feel very squeamish about destroying them. They're all in the attics waiting for the next generation to inherit - maybe we will be able to chuck them in a skip. I bet there are thousands in attics all over the country!

Letsallscreamatthesistene - I suspect you've not found anything because a 'mumsnetter' has lived there before you and found all the intresting stuff already ...which is now in their ancient house with the extra rooms.

Not really something I've found during renovation, but my sister recently got a tradesman in to measure and quote for some work.

They started chatting and discovered that he was the man that bought the house that my sister and our family had lived in during the 1990s when we were kids! We'd relocated to another area of the country at this point, but my sister has recently moved and returned to the area where we grew up for a bit.

This guy said that when they'd moved in, he'd found an old tea chest in a space above the garage that my parents had forgotten about, plus some old photos that had fallen down the back of a radiator.

Judging by the photos, he'd asked my sister if she had a brother (I guess I did look a bit more like a boy than a girl when I was about six!)

A dirty nasty carpet on top of an even dirtier carpet. Not to mention dog fleas that bit the hell out of me
Cast iron fireplace in each bedroom, painted white. On stripping I found several layers of white and two of green. It took weeks of painstaking scraping, paint remover and lastly fire black but I got there. A tiny leak behind kitchen sink, we only noticed because of a strange hissing noise. Cupboard is now without a shelf, had to rip it out to find hole and the floor and wall were like paste. I had to wait till it dried then repoint outside brick. Tiles in the bathroom stuck with sealant, oh the list is endless and still haven't finished renovating

I’ve never found anything more exciting than a couple of roof tiles in an attic, but my brother and I realised that our Gran’s house was a different shape outside to what it was inside. There were extra corners as you walked round the outside, but the walls inside were straight. It was obviously something quite large that had been bricked off. We’d been visiting for years before we sussed it out. No one else had noticed and, to the best of my knowledge, they never investigated it. My Gran was very superstitious and the house was very old, so she probably wanted just to leave well alone.

Please post your findings in this Facebook group!! They would the secret notes!! www.facebook.com/groups/thingsfoundinwalls/?ref=share

Friend bought a house last month found old brown and green plaque in loft. Gave it to me cos I like old crap. It's on my wall 🥰

@CalamariInCrisis

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!'.

Did you ask if his mum was buried beyond that cellar door?

We had a 13th century house and found a hand made shoe ( an old hand sewn leather mans show) from back then. It was hidden in behind a wall. We had to have a specialist re-plaster the wall in the old stylie as it was so wobbly it was falling into the room. Apparently they put a shoe in there for good luck when building. Wish we had taken a picture !
Now on our travels in rented houses all we find is landlords old 70´s stuff - mostly Spanish knick knacks or plastic stuff.

Found some tin tin comics in my loft, I used to decorpage the inside of some vintage suitcases.
OOOPS 😭

@bondgirl76

I lived in a very old house.My mother decided to take the very old fireplace out.Written in the plaster was the message." I forgot my sandwiches today" bloody annoyed.Bert.1883.I have thought of him a lot

I love this!

I also dream I've found extra rooms in my home. Or, not found exactly, more that I've just remembered they're there and I get all excited about the possibilities. They're usually utterly mad, too. (There's a flat I really want to look at right now mainly because it reminds me of these dreams!)

Ours are mainly poor building work ones....all in the same 1930s house.

Rennovating the kitchen, our builders took the sauna like ceiling down to find mumified mice and that the previous owners has removed the back wall of the house (about 60% of the total downstairs wall) to knock into the outhouses and create a long kitchen but had put nothing to hold up the two (cavity) walls above. Builder was ashen faced. Called structural engineer who was horrified and trying to figure out how the back wall of the house hadn't come down. Very anxious day when they had to try and get two steels under the hanging walls above to make it safe.

We then took down a partition wall to put in double doors to discover that was originally a solid wall. A steel had been put in but it was two railway girders welded together at the weaketlst point - totally unsafe. Yet more steel.

Said kitchen roof leaked inexplicably every time it rained. Our builder finally figured out that when someone had renovated the bathroom above, they'd taken out bricks when they changed the pipework and instead of putting new smaller bricks in the gaps they'd stuffed with newspaper and put a bit of pebble dash on top. Every time it rained the newspaper got soaked and the excess water ran straight down the wall cavity into the ceiling below.

Oh and there was no earthing in the property. Had to have the front garden dug up to get the electrics earthed.....

A previous house we lived in had an standard loft. No lights or Windows. But a massive fully constructed bookcase up there. Not sure why that would be needed.

Just remembered my MIL's stairs.
She lived in a 16th century house that they bought for not a lot in the 60s, with the long term plan to renovate it.
In what became the living room, there was a funny little boarded off corner. Turned out they had boarded up the original, twisty, staircase to upstairs.
Once unboarded she started to have the most horrible nightmares about them. (I don't know what, I'm afraid!)

They took the staircase out altogether and the nightmares stopped.

I rang the landlord (housing association) and they sent some poor retching bugger of a man to come and remove it 🤮

Sorry that was meant to be a reply about the bin of dog shit in my garden!