Weirdest thing (or things!) you found when moving house

[Arlanymor]

After four long days I am fully moved into my new place - while my back may be aching, my wallet is happy as I did it all myself! But in the process of going into the nooks and crannies of my old place I came across two interesting things (nothing exciting like witch bottles sorry, both buildings are only about 40-50 years old).

The first was when I was checking down the back of the old sofa which came with the old flat and which I frankly never sat on as it was far too uncomfortable - just a force of habit really, there wouldn't be any of my spare change down there! And wedged between the frame and cushions was a set of car keys with bleeper (am sure that's the technical name!) and - I kid you not - 12 DOOR KEYS! All different sizes/shapes for different doors, it was like a jailer's set!

The second was when checking under the fridge and I came across what USED to be a grape, but was now a perfect raisin with a stalk and everything! Must have dehydrated itself in a nice cold space. I now consider myself an amateur winemaker (right?!) Honestly though, if I had taken off the stalk and put it in a packet of raisins you wouldn't have known the difference - fascinating!

Maybe not all that exciting (probably not) but it's made me nosy for what other people might have found on their travels. Also I don't have proper internet yet - this is all phone data - so I don't have any TV. Although I did find a box with my mum's old DVD player that she gave to me because she had no use of it and suggested I put it on eBay... clearly I never managed to, nor the DVDs she gave me with it... so at least I am now watching Knives Out! Was so weird being in a house without any background noise... this is definitely helping it feel like home!

It wasn’t there when we moved in!

In the first house we bought, dh was looking around in the loft and found explicit letters and photos of the previous owner's husband with another man. The letters were from this other man to the husband and he must have hidden them up there, so Dh destroyed them all. The previous owner's best friend lived next door and she called round there nearly every day, then my child started at the same school as hers and I used to see her all the time. She completely blanked me and she'd been horrible to us during the buying process, we'd even let them stay an extra night after the house was ours as she was heavily pregnant and said she wasn't ready to leave (our solicitor strongly advised against this but we were young and still "wet behind the ears"). Then the day they finally moved out, they took absolutely everything, light bulbs, fixed toilet roll holder etc and then scraped all the wallpaper off the landing wall when moving furniture. However, I still felt very sorry for her when I saw her, knowing her husband was living some kind of double life with this other man.

In the first house we bought, we opened the oven to find 3 burnt sausages on a grill pan.

In the 3rd house we bought, we found a remote controlled butler on wheels carrying a tray in the roof, with a supply of rubber pants to fit an adult! (We think they held sex parties and the remote controlled butler was directed round with condoms on the tray).

My brother found a revolver in his attic when he moved in and had to call the police.

We moved into an Edwardian terraced house and when I popped my head through the hatch into the attic I found it empty apart from a statue of the Virgin Mary staring at me...

Mirrors everywhere - even in the garden shed - why? No back fence onto a public footpath - first thing we did obviously. Building a shoe rack but not fitting the new carpet underneath it so the old brown carpet was there when we took it out. The new carpet they fitted to sell the place was green. Totally bizarre.

Box of teeth and hair. We were like 19 so we both absolutely freaked out, I called my dad and showed him. He said they’re baby teeth and we should call the previous owners and tell them because they might be precious to them. The lady was very happy to have her box of teeth returned and told us we will get it when we have kids.

We have three kids now and I do have a box of teeth and hair but it’s much cuter and aesthetically pleasing than an old Tupperware.

When we moved to our present, rather rural house it was empty of any items but I don't think the folks we bought it from ( they had only lived in it a couple of years) had ever investigated the shed. For instance there was a huge wooden chest full of Kilner jars carefully wrapped in pages from early 1960s Radio Times'.
We also found a set of blueprints which were plans from when the shed was built in 1931 (it is a solid brick building with 2 small rooms). Evidently one room originally held a generator, the other a water pump. Lo and behold, under a slab in that room was a borehole. DH measured the depth to the water as 125 feet.

In the very first house I bought, a dildo was found in the airing cupboard (it wasn’t particularly hidden, just left on the top shelf) and when I came to renew the bedroom carpet there was a used condom under the underlay. Not sure if the vendors laid the carpet themselves (the place was full of crap DIY) or whether one of them had had some fun with the carpet fitters?

Whoever bought the house my family left when I was 4 will have found half the pieces of my old cot. From what I understand the packing got a bit behind as Mum got ill right before the move. I don’t know what else got left, but I don’t think the pieces of cot were the only things.

Never found anything but whilst a male friend was helping me move house he picked up a small bedside table and the draw swung open and my dildo collection was in it !!! 😳

Ha I did it deliberately as wasn’t sure if the real spelling would get flagged

A micro SD card that had fallen down between a kitchen shelf/counter. Many explicit photos of the ex tenant and her girlfriend. I just binned it. A few weeks later a taxi driver who picked me up said that his brothers ex girlfriend used to live here but she’d kicked him out and moved her girlfriend in and told me her name. Mutual friends on Facebook 🙈

There was a high up beam running the length of the hallway, clad in light coloured laminate wood effect flooring (in an 1860s house). We carefully removed it wondering if it might be boxed in pipes or some architectural feature, but no, nada, they’d just randomly created a fake wood six meter long beam.

In the cellar of my last 1930s house. An unused anderson shelter which I donated to the local museum.
A massive amount of sloe gin which was beautiful. No idea how old it was but it tasted lovely.

Glad you explained this! I thought it was going to go down the route of 'There's a small elderly Korean woman in my garden' or whatever that classic Mumsnet thread was titled years ago!

You win 🤣 although the eagle in the cupboard comes close. Poor eagle, what a way to live 😬

Moving into the house, lots of books on the Third Reich and some miniature spy cameras were amongst some other tat left in the loft.

Chickens were probably dinner for the eagle but were saved.

The only thing I found was a packet of frozen ham that had fallen down the back of the drawers in the freezer!

A 2x life-size mural of spiderman behind the wallpaper in the master bedroom.

A stash of 60s/70s Mills & Boon Dr/Nurse romances in the loft.

According to our new neighbours, the previous occupants had an interesting and very audible sex life.

House 1: Some boxes of rifle ammunition in loft (handed to police)
House 2: Serveral bags of well used porn mags in loft (straight to dump)
House 3: A full set of deer antlers in loft (left for the next owners)
House 4: Two full size fake plastic sheep in woodshed (DH has adopted them)

Some previous occupant of our last house had re-installed the old 1970s kitchen at the back of the garage for storage. They left lots of mechanical tools, tyre jacks, jump leads etc. We only lived there 18 months and didn't get round to clearing it until we moved. That's when we discovered one of the cupboards had a false back, behind which was a very extensive VHS porn collection. It was fairly mortifying taking that lot to the tip!

In the same house we discovered a bin bag in the attic with someone's birth certificate, passport, bank statements, professional exam certificates etc. Every important document we could have used to steal his identity. I don't know if he was just careless, or was there a backstory in which his partner had thrown him out after discovering the porn stash and shoved all his things up there?

We moved into a Victorian terraced house in the early eighties. In the loft, we found a beautiful spinning wheel. It had obviously been there a long time as the loft hatch was too small to get it out. We ended up leaving it there because it would have needed to be cut somehow, and we didn't want to risk damaging it.

About a million keys that don’t fit any of the doors in the house and yet there are several doors in the house that don’t have any keys at all.
Obviously we’ve kept the random keys and they are cluttering up a kitchen drawer.
A locked safe and no code. It’s very small and the previous owners said they bought the house with it in situ and don’t know the code.
its bolted to the wall from the inside so its staying there until someone decides to demolish the wall.

We moved into a flat that came with DDads job in the 1980's. We were assured it had been professionally deep cleaned before we got the keys. One of the things that Dmum loved was the smoked glass windows over the bedroom doors. I got up on a ladder to out a new light bulb in my room and saw that it was actually just thickly coated with nicotine. They'd just painted over the nicotine covered walls and ceilings and as the paint was still drying it covered the smell 🤢. The company had to put us up in a hotel while the whole flat was properly cleaned and re- re painted.