Kaffy Mintcake

Hi all,

So I've just stripped off the wallpaper border in our upstairs bathroom left over from the previous owners. True to form though, when we removed the towel bar we found not one hole on either side from where it was held into place, but six on the left, and three on the right. Great - lots of wall patching to do before I can paint. What kills me is that the former owner was an engineer ... kind of makes you wonder.

In the downstairs bathroom I found a hole which was patched with toilet paper of all things, and then painted over. Now I'm no guru when it comes to home repairs - but even I can patch a hole properly.

One of my coworkers had a great story though. When he toured his future home it was painted very nicely. He thought he would just be able to move in and be done. Much to his surprise, however, the previous owner hadn't removed any of his pictures or wall art before painting ... so he moved into a house nicely painted with various white squares present on all of the walls!

What discoveries have you run into when working on your home?

bevinva

Termites

Lord Lionheart

Here's a nice one. My old man started off as a plumber, then a builder, finally buying his own builder's merchants.
When we took over the business it had no toilet and one of the first things to do was install one ( a simple task as my old man is a plumber)
Upstairs was a stock room and above that a roof space with a trap door. My old man decided we'd expand the stock room into the roof space so we started looking up through the trapdoor at the various building options. When we got up into the roofspace we discovered loads of little brown bags which were used in the shop for nails, bolts and other loose hardware. There were probably over a hundred of these little brown bags with something in them ........................................ ....
Upon opening them each one was filled with human shit, someone had been shitting in the bags and throwing them up into the roofspace through the trapdoor
There was a pub around the corner and the previous owner only lived about 1/2 a mile away

another bloody yank

A newspaper a worker must have left, it was dated 1915, right about when the place was built.

bevinva

We did find a rats nest in a house we were working on. No rats home at the time but they had used part of a D-con bait box to make it!

When we do work on houses where people leave stuff I love looking through any old photos etc, just can't help myself. A house across the street was foreclosed on and the workers told my hubby they found pics of the man that used to live there "having relations" with a blonde. The blonde was not his wife but they said it was his house!

Tarkak9

when my parents were renovating their place years ago, they discovered behind the plaster jacobean panels... many guessed that they had been covered for about 200 years or so. All were in good condition bar 4, so they hired a french polisher to restore them.... who got high on his chemicals' fumes and ended up off loading all his marital problems upon my mum & dad!! That was quite the discovery.

Kaffy Mintcake

So it was without a toilet for a while eh? What a dirty old man!

Lord Lionheart

There were a couple of employees and a partner, we never found out who filled the bags prior to us taking over
As I said the pub was literally around the corner if you were desperate and why would you repeatedly do this, there were over 100 of them

cybersecretary

i am always suspicious of a nicely painted house for sale, there is often a reason its been spruced up! I'd rather see a house warts and all and do it up myself.

Kaffy Mintcake

Because it was a dirty old man who couldn't be bothered?

I know sometimes owners are told to paint right before they put the house on the market. I think that's what the previous owners here did, but they didn't always do a very good job.

Bill_S

Lots of electrical surprises. Like exposed live wires, connections insulated with masking tape, and hanging fixtures suspended by scraps of coathanger wire. Most though-provoking was a fragment of a page from the sports section of the Plain Dealer from late November 1963 - just a few days after JFK's assassination. I can't help but wonder what the news section of that paper was like.

MsElui

in one victorian house we had in england - we took the wallpaper off in an upstairs loo to find they had lino's the walls up to the dado rail?? In the same house they again took wallpaper off in the lounge to find tar paper up? they investigated this and found the walls underneath had dry rot and needed the plaster hacking off up to 1 meter and various chemicals being applied. We couldnt decorate or anything for a while after til it dried out!

Ray

I found a mint 1943 gas mask in my cellar in the UK

I had lived in the house for 5 years before I even knew
I has a cellar..the entrance had been carpeted over ..

Folinskyinla

Hi:

On two sided things, that is not all that uncommon -- the first set didn't match and they had to do it again on one side.

We bought our current house in 1995 -- at the very bottom of the LA real estate slump -- and it was vacant and from a bank. It took us six weeks just to get it livable. The house was built in 1939 and for the time, was top quality. Since then, we have done several major projects, and every one has been an adventure.

The most dangerous discovery was when we did the 2000 kitchen remodel, we had stripped it down to the subfloor and wall studs -- a prior remodel had had substandard electrical connection at the place where I had the coffee maker plugged in -- the wood was charred from the sparking!

BTW, during the electrical work during that remodel, we had to upgrade the electrical service a tad. [The house had been built with a huge, for the time, 100 amp service. With the addition of two 220v A/C units, it was inadequate -- so we had to bump it up.] To have safe access to the main box, the rear kitchen door had to be removed from its hinges. Well, when they broke for lunch, they locked up their tools in the truck and ALL of them went to lunch leaving the house wide open! When I came by at 12:45, I waited until their return at 1:15 to fire them. My father is a retired contractor and I KNOW that you leave one person on the unsecured worksite and bring lunch back to him.

basementwaj

i found a a small chip in the concrete on the corner of my driveway.

oooooh the humanity