I’ve done that.
But leaving it all behind is pretty weird.
My previous apartment showed the signs of someone enjoying DIY, but not having much sense. Some short pieces of baseboard in the living room were screwed to the wall with very visible, large head screws. Replacement handles in the kitchen were fastened with too long screws, so every drawer was booby trapped with screw tips sticking through to the inside.
And when I opened the connection box in the bedroom ceiling to mount a light I found the wires were connected in short circuit. Turns out he’d wanted another outlet in the living room and found it the most convenient to wire that from the light switch in the bedroom … :smack:
This doesn’t really fit the OP, but I was working on an old house fixing it up some. The original windows had been shimmed with baseball cards, 1920’s era. We took them to a dealer and he said if they were in better shape they’d have been worth several thousands of dollars … alas, they were in truly terrible shape and pretty much worthless.
Seems pretty predictable to me.
[Quote=Previous Owner]
AAAGH! It didn’t drain? Dammit. Ech, that’s nasty. Screw it. Just leave it all. We are OUT OF HERE.
[/quote]
I found a 1951 Topps Baseball card wedged in the back of a drawer. Red Back, unfortunately. 
There also was a rake in the basement that I still use.
Yeah, I think we decided we didn’t want to know. It sort of reminded me of those pickled piglets they used for dissection in high school.
We found a stack of magazines that was a mix of late 1970s-early 80s soft-core porn and religious/“how to find your guardian angel” stuff. Some friends of ours owned an antique/retro shop at the time, and we gave them the porn, on which they made a bundle.
Not long after, we started having trouble with the shower and when the plumber got into it, he found a half-full bottle of Bicardi among the pipes.
The rest was mostly assorted junk. Given how much there was, I’m kind of surprised we haven’t turned up a body at the bottom.
Maybe. But a full dishwasher represents a pretty good chunk of the dishes. Maybe it was crapware they were using after the good stuff was packed. Who knows…
Yeah, we had a house that took me a year to fix all the enthusiastic Home Depot genius screwups. Some I never have figured out, like the extremely cheesy cardboard bathroom door that had been laboriously and carefully enlarged by gluing multiple thin strips of wood to one side (about an inch) and bottom (about two inches). In a door frame made and trimmed with scraps about six inches long. It represented many, many hours of work and a lot of glue and small nails… when the prehung door I replaced it with cost under $30.
A buddy and I were roommates in West Texas back in the 1970s. The apartment we moved into turned out to have a working telephone already installed. However, we did not know the number. The landlord did not know the number. So we could use it to call out, but no one could call us. Then one day not too long after moving in, we were sitting around when the phone rang. !!! I answered it quickly, and a man on the other end asked for so-and-so. I said there was no so-and-so there, at least not anymore, but what number did he dial? Right about then, a third party picked up the phone. It was the person the caller was looking for, and he lived down the street. It turns out the previous occupant had tapped into this person’s phone line! We got it all sorted out, although that meant we lost that line and had to get our own phone, with bills and everything.
After that apartment, my roommate and I moved into a house, and this time a cat was left behind by the previous occupant. It was a sweet little thing, and we kept her. Lived there for three years, during which time my roommate changed, and when I moved out, the other roommate kept the cat.
When I was a small tyke and we moved to Port Orchard, Washington, we discovered that night that the bedroom ceilings were painted with softly glowing-in-the-dark stars that were invisible during the day. They were quite beautiful. I understand that when my parents sold the house when we moved to Spirit Lake, Idaho they didn’t tell the new owners about this little feature…but my mother did receive a postcard from them that had a star-filled sky on one side, with the other side saying “Thank you”.
We left those in the kids rooms in our old house. Never heard anything about it, but someone would have to break the grouchy meter to complain about something like that.
Not quite the topic here, but in two houses I’ve found there are people who don’t understand that water runs downhill and can’t understand why there’s water in their basement (or their down cellar as the case may be).
In my house the entrance to the attic is inside a closet and requires the remove of shelves.
A friend called me about a dim light at his house. An electrical outlet was wired in series with the lamp.
I never found out how that came out; he was not on good terms with his landlord.
We found dozens of hooks, some heavy duty, screwed into the ceiling of the garage. Not sure what or who had been hanging from them. :eek:
The winner in this category was the homeowner who discovered that the rusty 55-gallon drum that had been in a basement crawl space through the tenure of multiple previous families, contained the mummified body of a pregnant woman.
*turns out that the first owner of the house named in the story (Howard Elkins) had killed the woman and stuffed her body in the industrial drum, apparently intending to take it out on his boat and dump it overboard. It seems that it was too heavy for him to lift, so he just left it in the crawl space where it remained for many years.
I owned a house that had a regular, finished basement, but also a 10x10 “cold cellar” under the front porch. In that cellar were shelves where you could store stuff.
There was also a wall safe with a combination dial. The previous owner didn’t have the combination, and they did not use the room for any purpose.
I was cleaning out the room and found a piece of crumbling paper on one of the shelves. On it was the combination. I opened the safe. It was empty except for a piece of paper with the combination written on it.
First apartment I moved into was ca. 1972. It was months after moving in that I noticed the ceiling in the hall was lower than the other rooms. It was a false ceiling, and above was a collection of Reader’s Digest and Coronet magazines from the 1940’s. Probably all available online now, but then it was quite an interesting find. I wonder how many tenants before me overlooked this, or perhaps enjoyed it.
Probably so; none of it was particularly good or matching stuff. But we did end up keeping a few glasses, a saucepan and a fairly nice bowl. We still regularly use the saucepan, as a matter of fact, while the glasses and bowl have broken or otherwise been disposed of.
In the backyard, dug up by doggie:
-Antique brass candle snuffer
-Art Deco-design door pull
-Various iron and brass things that look very old: doorhinges, drawer pulls, doorknobs
Things we found in the backyard with our metal detector:
-Toy WWII Messerschmitt metal plane
-A small brass plate with a name and “b. 1936 - d. 1945.” I think (hope) it was a pet grave marker
-Another brass candle snuffer
And among the enormous amount of rocks: a dinosaur toenail.
Not my house, but a house we were looking at buying, reminded me of this.
The basement was mostly unfinished cement - except for one corner, opposite the stairs. In that corner, there was a room with a very basic ensuite bathroom, fitted out as a bedroom. A gloomier, more depressing place for a bedroom you could not imagine - it had only a tiny window for light, it was in a bare unfinished basement, etc.
The kicker was this: the door was very solid wood, and it had a hasp for a padlock - on the outside.
My wife and I were all ‘WTF?’ :eek: We were thinking ‘this can’t be what it looks like’ - namely, a sort of dungeon.
Anyway, we did not put a bid on this house.
When we were in the market for a house, we looked at one with the same exact setup in the basement. We were outside that house, and on to the next one on the prospect list, in about a minute. It’s a little disheartening to read about how common a feature that is in this thread.
In the house that we did buy, behind the frame of some basement shelves, I found a very old bottle labeled for bicarbonate of soda tablets (it looks kind of like this one, but it used to contain bicarbonate of soda tablets, according to the label). The little bottle weighs about three or four pounds, though; it’s filled with a liquid that I’m guessing is mercury, but I’ll confirm that someday with someone who knows what they’re doing.
While digging up some dirt outside one of our basement windows for a flower garden, I came across an empty one-pint liquor bottle. My guess is that it fortified one of the workmen who built our house in 1955; I cleaned it up and it’s now on top of our basement bar, about seven or eight feet away from where I dug it up.
Mine was in Toronto, so I assume it’s not the same house … 
Reminds me of another find - again, not mine, but a friend. I was helping him to dig out the interior of an old barn on his property in the country. In one corner of the barn, we found a whole pile of old patent medicine bottles from the turn of the century, all with different names embossed in the glass (one I remember was called “Eclectric Oil” - I looked it up, and it is considered worthless - some of the other bottles may have been valuable. My buddy cleaned them and made a display of 'em).
My guess: someone working on that farm around the turn of the last century was going into that barn and sucking back those patent medicines while out of sight, and burying them there. Presumably, lots of those medicines had ingredients that could get you high - alcohol, laudanum, opium, etc.