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!

When we moved in, there was a hideous orange pine dresser wedged solid into an alcove. The only way to get it out seemed to involve a sledge hammer, so that is what we deployed, first thing the following morning. On removal it was apparent that it had been screwed to the wall.

A couple of days later the previous owners turned up to collect their "heirloom dresser"

The weird thing is, when we arrived at the house to move in, they were still there. If they'd asked we would have waited before smashing it up, but they never said a word about it.

Crikey...how did they react when you said it was gone?

A porno, a shell suit jacket and half a packet of fags in the crawl space above the bathroom. Obviously someone must have been enjoying some personal time.

They were fairly ok about it to be fair, but they said they didn't think we would start smashing the house up quite so soon. I think the humungous skip that was delivered, literally minutes after the moving van pulled up, should have been their first clue as to our intentions.

This is one of my worst nightmares. Aren't there rules about leaving a place empty when it's sold?

This is what I was thinking - I remember moving out of my last house with a dustpan filled with the last bit of sweeping up because I was so worried about getting charged for any mess! 😂

The woman selling us our current house held up the sale by 16 weeks because we didn’t want to buy her manky curtains. They were old, never been washed and covered in nicotine and she wanted £1000 for them!

She’d ask if we wanted them, we’d say no, she’d fanny about getting bits of paperwork in and her solicitor to do things and then ask us again. In the end we told her if she didn’t drop it, we’d pull out.

Guess what was bloody there the day we moved in.. 🤬🤬

A very dusty, fully decorated Christmas tree...
And four video recorders.

Somebody had definitely laid the carpet, one way or another...

My parents got married,moved in with my grandad and then rented a flat above a shop before buying a house

My father went to have a nose around the attraction the flat and found a load (a few dozen boxes) of old paperwork from the shop below (old receipts and other bits) from the victorian era

He loved them,moved house with them,donated loads to a local museum and kept a few for us to 'show and tell' at school as we got older

(which we did and I got loads of praise in history class,i had offered to take him in as my 'old object' but he just gave me a handful of old papers and told me to 'bring em back!')

A fossilised sausage in the back of the oven. I
The oven was too filthy to use for the supermarket pizza we had planned for tea. When the oven cleaner came the following day, he was amazed the oven didn't have a light, until he uncovered it.
The sauage was lurking at the back.
Disgusting
This was a naice middle class family with 2 teens and a 3yo 🤷‍♀️

A dolls house, which the teenage daughter of the family who'd had the house before us decided to leave behind for me. I was 7 or 8 at the time, and it was a lovely find.

A stack of1930’s coins on the rafters when we converted out garage. I put them back with some 2019 ones.

Two sets of very nice bedspreads and pillowcases to match. Both with lovely embroidery on it. They were in the attic so I was expecting them to be mouldy or musty but they are in perfect condition. I haven’t gotten around to washing them yet as we just moved in two weeks ago!

A packet of Viagra - at the back of a kitchen drawer.

Nobody is going to beat the boob job paperwork!! 😆

Some very saucy love letters between the owners who’d obviously had a torrid affair 😳 I couldn’t even return them as they’d know I’d read them so kept schtum 🤐

When we moved into our first house, the previous owners had taken away everything, including all the light bulbs from all the sockets, but at the back of a shelf in the broom closet, there was a large, clearly home-made Christmas cake. It was sitting, uncovered, on a silver cake board and the royal icing was grey with dust. I ran into one of the previous owners unexpectedly shortly after and mentioned that they'd forgotten the cake. I was being a bit sarky because they had taken absolutely everything else. His reply, totally serious I think, was that we should just enjoy the cake!

Now I'm disappointed that we've never had any horrors left for us.
At our current house the previous owners left us a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates and a vase full of flowers.

A delightful stone statue of two pigs having sex, with the words "Piggin' it" chiselled into the base. I can't think why they didn't want to take it with them! Also a garden full of fossilised dog poo.

Nothing all THAT bad as the inside of the house was left pristine. However..... in the shed at the bottom of the garden, there was a gigantic plastic sack with more than 500 little yellow rubber ducks! Apparently the previous owner ran duck races for charity in the little river/stream in the park at the back and he left them behind. So cute, we lined them up the garden path and back down again, and there were still lots left over. Donated them to the local SN hospital nearby.

AND.... against the wall of said shed was a big grave marker, huge wooden cross, name, date of death, age. Creepy! It was a temporary marker for the owner's late brother. The irony is, he is buried three graves along from my parents. Who knew! Owner said to get rid of it, and we did.

hundreds of unpressed records.

Found 6 aged docked lambs tails under the cooker ,in a bag disgusting
wtf

I'm in a rental while we look for our next purchase. The downstairs loo was taken out and remodelled into a pantry. There is an extractor fan cover in the pantry, attached to a big pipe that spans the utility, exiting the house beside the back door.

It doesn't have a cover because a family of blackbirds live in it and scurry up and down inside the pipe, squawking and flapping every morning. They then spend the day queueing(!) up in the garden to use the bird bath or snacking on bird seed/ suet snacks In the trees.

I found this wrinkled potato when I was moving and drew a little face on it!