Our seller left a sizable quantity of butter behind, which we decided against consuming. At least they cleared out the many Mason jars of home-processed green beans down in the basement, which had taken on a lurid color not previously seen in this galaxy. The beans, not the basement.
On the positive side, they left behind an enormous roll of aluminum foil that practically takes two people to lift. It should last until the next millennium.
The former owner of my home left some clothes in the dryer. Since he had moved to Florida on his departure, I gave the stuff to the Goodwill. In the attic I found a plastic replica of a bottle of Tabasco sauce. The thing is about 3-4 feet tall. It was thrown into the unfloored area so it’s still there. I have a closet built into the outside of the house. He left a bunch of garden tools in it so that was nice.
When my siblings and I remodeled and painted the interior of our parents’ house prior to putting it up for sale after they both passed, we would put the paint rollers (wrapped in plastic wrap) in the refrigerator. The fridge had actually been rolled into the garage next to the kitchen anyway for purposes of painting the kitchen and for more room to move things from the garage thru the kitchen into the rest of the house.
I had never heard of doing this but I was told at the end of the day one didn’t have to wash out the rollers and could just start right up painting the next day. This proved to be true. We’d have 4 or 5 rollers in there every day.
We left the partial paint cans for the new owners and I’m pretty sure we took the rollers out of the fridge and tossed them. I know we never rolled the fridge back into the kitchen. Made the kitchen look bigger that way.
Anyway, that’s likely why you found a paint roller saturated with paint in your basement refrigerator.
A 3-4 foot replica of a Tabasco bottle would be a great ornament for the vegetable garden, towering over the hot pepper plants.
If you ever want to sell that I’d definitely be interested in acquiring such an item.
This thread brings back memories of another thread… someone found an old locked box under the floorboards or in the crawlspace or someplace similar. When he found it he, naturally, did not open it but instead posted about it here. However I think he eventually opened it and posted about it.
I cant find the thread, but I’ll keep looking. IIRC It was one of our Aussie Dopers, but not Melbourne or Martini Enfield.
A friend of mine would love that! But I’m never going to walk across the beams to get it.
It never crossed my mind that anyone would want that thing. But, again, I’m never going to walk across the beams to get it. It’s way back in a corner. When I first saw it, I wondered why someone would throw it back there. Why not just put it on the street or something? Must have had their reasons.
Well, this thread didn’t go where I thought.
When my sister and her husband moved into their first home they found a $50 giftcard and a delivery menu from a local pizza place.
I guess they were lucky.
Considering how dirty my house was when I moved in, I’m surprised that I didn’t find any odd things in the cupboards or frig. But around the barn is another matter entirely.
In the 2+ years I’ve been here, I’ve pulled up 9 full length beat up unusable hoses partially buried in the ground between the barn and the irrigation spigot. Apparently they didn’t believe in coiling up hoses and just left them laid out where the cows could walk on them and bury them in the mud. I think there’s another couple down there, they just haven’t surfaced yet. As expensive as hoses are, it seemed like an especially lazy and stupid thing to do.
I’ve also found a few mysterious iron items, a large chunk of 5" dia. pipe, and a couple of iron bands from whiskey barrel planters. Weird shit.
Advice taken, @thorny_locust and @wolfpup. On consideration, I’m thinking it might also be a burglar trap.
When I walked into the first house I bought, there were three liquor bottles on a shelf in the kitchen. I thought, great, they left their recycling behind. Turned out to be three, unopened bottles of sherry, and a note addressed to me saying congratulations and welcome. I drank the sherry.
In the freezer, I found a couple of homemade rhubarb pies in pyrex pie plates and a prime rib roast. I guess they didn’t want to throw them out. I ate them. When I left that house, I accidently left behind a bag of food in the fridge I meant to take with me. I remembered after I tossed to keys back through the mail slot.
This house had all kinds of stuff left behind, furniture, tools, kitchenware, odds and ends, and food in the pantry and freezer. We had expected some things to be left behind, so no surprise and most of it is useful. We ate some of the food. Some is still in the pantry.
This house once had a tiny closet filled with old newspaper funny pages; my PITA brother asked Mom to save them while he was bumming around Europe and we simply left them there when we moved.
I once lived next door to an old guy who was a self-employed genealogist. That guy literally hoarded textbooks.
Well, stop with the funding, then. You’re only encouraging the bushes.
I found a beat up hose that I trashed . Also they left 2 propane tanks. I will likely get a natural gas grill next summer so I guess I can recycle the tanks.
When we took possession of my current property, there was a 42,000 lb. bulldozer in the pasture furthest from the house, about a quarter mile away and out of sight. The prior owners had promised to move it out before we moved in, but when they tried to fire it up to drive it out, the damn thing threw a rod and became a hulking mass of recycling.
The only way to get to it was to drive through our two main pastures, over a dirt-bridge-with-culvert to traverse a small stream and into the 2 1/2 acre hidden pasture. The pasture had been converted to timber and was full of baby trees.
We let it slide for 2 and a half years before we gently reminded the sellers to come retrieve it. I was relieved to have an appointment scheduled for when the big moving day occurred.
The former owners sent a massive hauling trailer and yarded the bulldozer out, winching it on to the trailer. Somehow the dirt bridge/culvert withstood the weight.
I learned the operation had been successful when I drove home from my appointment and passed the hauling trailer with its cargo. Yayy, happy ending all around.
We found a drivers license of some woman (not the previous resident), a checkbook, and a video tape in our attic.
We got the license back to the rightful owner.
The video was a home made porn tape.
I’m semi-bored scrolling quickly through this thread, and my brain thought this said “one legged BEAR”.
I’d kinda like to hear about the one legged baby; I’d really like to hear what story you could make up about a one-legged bear!
When I started my first ever real job (1986), there was a can of Point Bock Beer in one of the drawers. One of my co-workers said that the previous holder of that job was given that a NUMBER of years before, and kept it around, so I kept it around. We moved to cube-land. I not only kept the can, I left it prominently on top of my upper-cabinet. Well, two years later, my boss gets a call from security about one of his employees having alcohol at work. “Was it a can of Point Bock?” “Yes.” Of course, my boss laughed. When my department was sold, I left it there. I sometimes wonder what happened to that can. By now, it would be at least 40 years old…
When we took a wall down, we found some paperwork that had likely fallen from the attic down the side. It was two double-entry accounting pages from the home’s builder/first owner. The slight twist is that he built the house in 1760, and the pages were from 1770 ( he was in the Minutemen, and bought a musket!). We also found a lot of corn cobs, but those were on purpose.
The owner previous to us also left us a LOT of crap they’d dug out of the ashpit behind the house (e.g. vintage toys, bottles, and ceramics), but only damaged stuff…my suspicion is that they took anything valuable.
While doing some electrical work in a house a relative had moved into a couple years before, I was working in the basement rafters above a suspended ceiling. The previous owners had used the room as a bedroom for their teenage son. In a rafter brace above a suspended ceiling panel, I found a plaster casting of an intimate body part. (And that boy was well endowed!)
I suggested that my relatives wrap it and return it to him as a graduation present that coming June (he was Salutatorian), but they refused.
In the 1970s, my family moved into a house in Wisconsin.
On the second floor, in an attic converted into a bedroom, with found a small, taxidermied Alligator.
Dyed Orange.
My pet dog, Billy, used to like to chew on the tail.
I bought a house that had a 10’x10’ “cold cellar” that extended out under the front porch. There was a safe built into the wall, but the sellers told me they didn’t have the combination.
When I decided to use the room to grow “tomatoes” and was cleaning it up and adding electrical service, I found a scrap of old, nearly crumbled paper wedged in the ceiling. By playing with the lighting I was able to make out three numbers, which turned out to be the combination to the safe.
It was empty.