finding odd things when doing renos

it wasnt actually a reno when we had our find it was after a tenant vacated.
Under the stairs in a cupboard we found and EXTREMELY large amount of mail.Mail addressed to previous owners/tennants, some we had never heard of and not all with the ips address on it.we wondered if our tenant had a mail fettish!!!!
we returned the bags full of it all to the local Post Office and l hope it didnt cause anyone too much grief.
cheers yadreamin
 
Ol School Skata said:
In my first reno, which was a bit of a batchelor pad for a while, i ripped up the carpet and traced a couple of dead body outlines on the floor with white paint of a couple of girlfriends, like you see in the movies, complete with red paint for blood.

OSS
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Had some soldiers do this at my last unit. They chalked an outline and strung up some crime scene tape on the front steps of the unit HQ early one Monday morning.
 
Unfortunately, I haven't found anything interesting in my renos. Wait a minute, the hidden chute I found in the old kitchen in my first PPOR may count! It looked like a hidden treasure at the time! O well, hope springs eternal. :D
 
If anyone does a reno pn one particular wall of this my PPOR, they're going to find an 8 metre tape :mad: . I want it back but figured the effort it will take will cost me more than th $30 it's worth.

If anyone renos my grandparents old place, they're going to find a whole lotta empty beer bottles in one of the chimneys that have had the top knocked off it and the roof go over it.

When I was 12ish, my uncle who was 16 lived there and he and a couple of his friends would hide up there and drink a few. I got to go up once or twice. :rolleyes:
 
Not an IP but our ppor is an old church and underneath the carpet in our bedroom, which was the old sunday school out the back, they must have laid the slab during one of many working bee's. Carved into the slab was VE day, 1945.
JIM
 
We found an old little tin car behind one of the cabinets in our PPOR when we were renovating the kitchen. And a box of old papers, paint cans and a photo taken on Sydney harbour circa 1950's in an old box up in the roof (we're in Melbourne).

Depreciator, when I read: "If you're thinking there is a nice timber floor under here begging to be discovered and polished, forget it" I nearly fell off my chair laughing. What I would give to be a fly on the wall when that gem is discovered...!!!!! :D
 
Its truly amazing whats been found.
A lady l know had her Mothers engagement ring returned to her after 30 years of being lost.The Mother gave a stack of linen to her neighbour, the ring slipped off her finger and lay nestled in the linen for 30 years.When the neighbour had to move into a Nursing home she helped her family sort through the cupboards[nothing ever got thrown out in these days] unfolded the linen and out fell the ring.They lady knew whose ring it was because she had helped search days and days for it, so they contacted the surviving family and returned the ring.:)

cheers yadreamin

ps depriciator you get 10 points for the forget the polish floor message.:D
must say though l would be thankful if l found that message. but would l believe it?????oh tempting
 
yadreamin said:
ps depriciator you get 10 points for the forget the polish floor message.:D
must say though l would be thankful if l found that message. but would l believe it?????oh tempting
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Knowing me I'd have to have a look anyway. I laughed when I read that post too. It's a shame you didn't think to write 'I told you so!!' under the masonite :p .

I love the missing ring story ya dreamin.
 
When I renovated a house of mum's I pulled off the wall lining in the old bathroom
and found this written by my brother.....

"here is a blood sample and DNA for 'Joe Bloggs'.Suicide of thumb May 12 1976"

:D
 
The things you find out. Hubby has just confessed when relining a wall in one of our IP's he ran out of hardwood noggins so he used a bit of pine instead and wrote termite food on it. :)
 
When I was working on Myrtle Cottage I found (apart from the rat's nests) empty lunch wrappers and drink cans and all sorts of builder's debris in the walls.

When we pulled the wall off the kitchen and WC at the child care centre, the electrical wiring was almost non-existent in the kitchen wall - eaten by things with teeth - but in the cavity of the WC wall we found drink containers, cigarette packets, and many, many cigarette butts, all of which seemed to have smouldered to extinction in the wall.

The cistern had been moved at least twice in the history of the building, leaving pipe sized holes in the plasterboard. Obviously, various occupants of the building (the family? the child care workers?) had enjoyed a quiet fag in the loo then flicked the butts through the holes. I noticed that none of the butts had been (a) butted, or (b) dunked! How a fire hadn't started in there with all the dust and fluff and paper is amazing!

When we also removed the wall furnace, we found that the hardwood timber framing had charcoaled inside the wall - that's how hot the furnace had been over many years!!

Again, at Myrtle Cottage, after the floor gave way under me while I was smashing and levering up the floor tiles (borers - eeeeuuuw! what a stink!), the vanity waste pipes were non-existent as they had been eatern away by the rats. So the owner had obviously not been big on washing his hands for a few years as the water would have run straight from the waste and into the cupboard. Mind you, one of the owners had died in the shower so perhaps that had something to do with it!

The nicest thing I have found was a piece of masonite nailed to the frame in the garage, with a history of servicing the motor vehicles chalked on the board. It was a lovely and nostalgic momento indicative of Saturday afternoons spent pottering about with cars in the years when people actually did those things!

Cheers

Kristine
 
Brenda Irwin said:
The things you find out. Hubby has just confessed when relining a wall in one of our IP's he ran out of hardwood noggins so he used a bit of pine instead and wrote termite food on it. :)
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Classic! :D

RJ
 
In the far, dark and musty corner of a kitchen cupboard we found dozens of discarded predecimal coins. There were both copper and silver coins. Didn't make us rich but they are now worth a tad more than face value :D
 
ani said:
When I renovated a house of mum's I pulled off the wall lining in the old bathroom
and found this written by my brother.....

"here is a blood sample and DNA for 'Joe Bloggs'.Suicide of thumb May 12 1976"

:D
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i didn't think DNA samples were widely used in 1976, or possibly even common society being aware of them ? (and i dont mean to imply you are "common" but was yoru brother a scientist or somethin ?)
thats why even now, they are reopening cases from like the 80s, and being able to obtain dna matches and stuff
 
Checking the roof in the house we had just bought, found the old shingle roof from the 1870's over the front 2 rooms, ballarat's gold history shining through.
 
When we lived in England, we lived in an old terrace. We repapered (wallpaper is hugely more popular in England than here)- and found a message- "papered by xxx and yyy 1896".

It obviously did not apply to the wallpaper which we removed, but we did add our own message for the next renovators.

I hope they didn't paint instead.
 
After reading this thread I wrote "www.somersoft.com" on the inside of the kickboards in my new kitchen and the date :D

RJ
 
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