Has anyone found anything interesting left in a house by the old owners ?

[cleo333]

im interested in this esp old houses ( I had a friend who found dinky cars )

Few days after we moved in the previous owner arrived to retrieve stuff from the safe which we did not know existed! It was under the floorboards and was full of really valuable jewellery left to him by his mother ... beautiful stuff. I think we should have claimed it as ours as it was on our property!

tape recorder with a biro stuck to thd top eith blue tac. For those too young to be familiar with tape recorders, the biro was for rewinding the tape when it went slack .... a vital tool!

We found a stash of paintings in the loft painted by the wife of the previous owner who had died. Thing is, we found them a good 20 years after we had bought the house and we had lost track of the family by then.

In the most extraordinary coincidence we within a week had a DPD driver turn up at the door and he said 'Oh! I know this house I used to go out with xxx the daughter who lived here'. It turned out he was still in touch with the family and he told the daughter we had her mother's paintings and she turned up a few days after that to collect them!

Timely news story on this: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clypwjd179qo

From the writing on the labels, we found what appeared to be home made porn on VHS. The previous owners had lived there for about 40 years so assumed it was theirs. We didnt watch it!

When we cleared my Mums house after her death, She had nothing much of high value, but I asked my brother “but where is the family silver & her jewelry box ?” Then he remembered they had a stash where these items were hidden in the back of a laundry cupboard, (as there had been many carers over the years & quite a lot if things disappeared.

It was nearly left behind.

This has reminded me!
We found a miniature cannon in the loft of the first house we bought. Phoned estate agent who queried sellers and said they didn't put it there. Gave it to the local museum. It was roughly terrier-sized.

Pork sword 😋😂

Victorian coins hidden in my two ft thick stone walls. A gold cross fell out of the wall too. A handmade wooden milking stool. A hand forged iron hook. Hand written notes under the stairs about what should be kept on each shelf. This house is getting on for 160 years old so it also has an area outside with previous owners little doggy gravestones and stuff like that. We found some really old newspapers as well behind a wall, and what appeared to be Victorian wallpaper.

Our previous owner left a loft full of stuff, included a bin bag of childhood teddies, and a bridesmaid dress. I still have a serving dish he left in a cupboard, over twenty years later.

@Hamelawow you’re so lucky to be finding things. Our house is Georgian but we’ve found nothing so far except the previous owner’s old business records which were modern and of no interest. I’m assuming they removed anything they found when they did their own renovations 40yrs ago.

My parents found an unexploded WW2 bomb in the loft. My friend found samurai swords in hers.

An old stamp collecting book. A few uninteresting photos of some foreign looking landscapes (no people). The most interesting was a tube full of extremely meticulous pencil technical drawings of lathes etc. Obviously done for some level of schooling judging by the title boxes. We showed the kids, they were very impressed that such accuracy and detail was ever required by hand.

The worst thing has been the absolute rubbish that infests every bit of the garden. I have dug up tonnes and tonnes of rubbish - mostly plastic broken into a thousand pieces, and glass - so much glass. And a surprising number of spoons. And a shoe. The gravel driveway was littered with old nails and screws, it almost felt deliberate. After 4 punctures in 6 months I acquired a metal detector and a strong magnet and fished out a large jam jar full!

That's a bit of a let down...

Not interesting but the owner of my current home left a grand piano, a huge box of wool, paper flowers and 1000 spiders.

A cat buried under the door threshold to ward off evil.

Only 3 very old and well used toilet brushes!

Aww, don't feel too disappointed. She had a good life 😆

Newspapers dating to the 1960s in lieu of underfelt under the carpets. Also stuffed into holes in the outside wall and plastered over! Donny Osmond pictures cut from magazines stuck on the wall and wallpapered over. The remains of an Anderson shelter in the garden. Also, all sorts dug up in the garden: whole glass bottles (about perfume scent sized), shillings, horse teeth, all sorts really. The joys of an old, badly maintained house.

Pulling up the disgusting old carpet I knelt on something sharp. Turned out to be a gold tooth crown. The sort of thing you would have thought people would have spent time looking for, but there you go. Still have it somewhere, though it doesn’t fit any of my teeth.

( no, I haven’t tried!)

In a house DH recently redecorated he found 5 layers of wallpaper in what had obviously been a girls room. The bottom layer was My Little Pony. It took him ages to steam it all off.

Creepy large wine bottle stuffed with human hair, bound with black rags and a few old shells. It was buried along our fence, my superstitious sister told me it was obviously black magic and good we found it because now the house would be cleansed. Funnily enough, up until we found it we had a strange series of terrible accidents, falls and illnesses in our new house. As soon as we got rid of it no more accidents.

😳

In our current house we found pocket sized old bibles and service books from WWII.

Also old plates and trinkets within the plaster in the walls.

In our old turn of the century 1900 house we found the date etched into plaster in the attic. When I looked at the census it told us the family who lived there at the time - dad was a sailmaker and their daughter (5 years old at the time of the census) named Gwendolyn.
When we left in 2014, I wrote our names down too.

When I visit old houses/churches etc I love looking at historic graffiti.

4k cash 🤣