It was not uncommon to lock up the “crazy child” in the basement. :eek:
I mean they thought lobotomies were medical science. :mad:
At the house we rented we found a mattress on the room of the garage, seems like that’s where the teen kids went “to look at the stars”. Now, sure it doesnt rain all that much in San Jose, but it does rain.
There was also a safe, whose hinges had been sawed open.
While digging up the side yard to extend our foundation, the workers dug up a rusted 30-gallon water heater. Our guess was the previous owner didn’t want to pay to have it hauled away. About an hour later, they dug up a second one.
Ah, yes. The five different patters of wallpaper - none of which even slightly matched. Flock is particularly hard to remove.
Oh, well, at least the bedrooms in the house we moved into were painted. But, hang on - in a certain light… …the lazy buggers! they painted straight over the wallpaper! (Confirmed when all the paint peeled over the next few months).
So…8 different patterns of wallpaper to remove.
I hate wallpaper.
When I moved out of home I left a collection of stolen large real estate signage under a thin layer of dirt under the house, my mother never mentioned it so I presume some future owners found my quite extensive stash. No, I have no idea why I took them, teenagers. Could be quite the time capsule if undiscovered for a while I guess.
On the padlocks on the outside of doors, did nobody else live in dodgy shared housing situations? In my student days I lived in all sorts of normal looking houses with strangers and locks on the outside of bedroom doors to protect our stuff when out. It was a better system than the place I lived in with proper door locks on every bedroom door, locksmiths were needed regularly when doors slammed shut in the wind (or via carelessness) with the keys inside.
#129, There was a time when most stores had a dispenser for string like that for tying up the purchases which had been wrapped in paper from a big roll of wrapping paper beside the counter.
Escher Wallpaper, very glossy. Teal and white cavalrymen on one wall, 70’s puke-gold, brown and white 3-d boxes on the opposite wall.
This was on the long walls of a 10X14’ bedroom with an Eastern exposure. Imagine waking up to THAT each morning?
When we ere house-hunting, we had nicknames for all the houses we visited.
We called this one the “Boo Radley House”. 
It’s a possibility, but in our specific case a doubtful one: this wasn’t a rooming house, and none of the other doors in the house had locks at all. The distrust only extended to the one room.
A rather large sign, looked like perhaps a stolen or retired railway or subway sign, for København. Looked pretty authentic from the wear and design.
The previous owner’s husband was apparently some kind of mad carpenter. My wife’s theory is he spent his time in the basement building bizarre, massively over-engineered, barely functional items so he wouldn’t have to hang out with his wife/family. She seemed a pleasant woman to me, but then again we only met her a couple of times.
Anyways, there was this monstrous thing in the basement that could only marginally be described as a storage cabinet. It was about 8’ long, 4’ high, and 2’ deep, covered with 1/4" plywood, with an open front and divided into 4 equal compartments. Nothing that strange about it until I started taking it apart. After removing the plywood, the frame was composed of anywhere from three to five 2x4’s, screwed together every 4-5 inches into these massive beams, then screwed together into a rectangular cuboid frame. When I had finished dismantling it I had taken close to a thousand screws out of this thing. I could have easily rebuilt the thing using a small fraction of the wood and just a couple dozen screws.
There’s also a small, non-functioning spa tub in the basement bathroom that’s inset into the floor about a foot and a half, but after some thought we figured that was because the previous owners were tall.
Not really all that weird, but worth a remark. The guy who owned our house previously was not much for repairing things (and he bought all his house stuff at the local Sears, including appliances). Every time he needed to hang something in a closet, he got out a random nail and simply hammered it in. He never used any sort of hooks or hangers. Our closets were filled with a weird collection of mismatched nails, all at the same height above the ground. I pulled them all out.
If he couldn’t or didn’t want to use a nail, he stuck it up with scotch tape (the shiny kind, never “magic” transparent tape with the matte finish). The tape strips were at the same height as the nails, and were a pain to remove. To this day, I occasionally find another strip of tape.
I can’t think of much that I’ve found in places over the years, just lots of small toys in the yard. When I got a new roof this spring, after the roofers left one day, I found an old license plate – from an era when I did not live in this state – just randomly in the backyard. Now, it is not possible that I missed this thing because I’ve been over every square inch of my backyard – I landscaped the whole thing. That’s how I found all the toys. I think it was up on my roof. I’m still scratching my head about that.
Anyway, I just remembered a little “find” that I left behind in a house I lived in. The landlady had this ex who was apparently batshit and would start a project and never finish it. So he’d gouged out a hole in the wall in the kitchen that was meant for a built-in spice rack that never got built. She and I covered it with cardboard and then sprayed that foam insulation stuff into the hole. Later, I sanded that all flush with the wall, covered the whole mess with joint compound and primed and painted. Voila, hole in the wall fixed. In the process, I had found some tiny Kachina dolls about an inch high, that the previous tenant had left behind for some reason. Before I applied the joint compound, I stuck them into the various nooks and crannies in the dried foam insulation. It will require some kitchen archeology, but eventually, someone is going to find these Kachina dolls plastered into the wall and they will wonder what in the fuck. I was just creating a little Anasazi village because that’s what the hole looked like before we filled it in.
I don’t think it’s the same house, but we saw something similar house hunting. It was a three-level walkout basement townhouse. It was in a fairly nice neighborhood, but it had a security camera above the front door. The main level was very well done – wainscotting, chair rails, crown molding and all that. In the master bedroom upstairs, there were two LCD monitors mounted to the foot of the bed. One showed the front door security camera, one was blank.
The basement had three rooms – an unfinished utility room with a washer/dryer, the water heater and the air mover, a den with a sliding door going out to the backyard…
and a windowless 10x10 room with a padlock hasp on the outside and a security camera mounted high on the wall inside. We didn’t put a bid either.
I worked in a department store (a four-story, Macy’s/Marshall Fields-type store with several restaurants, beauty salon, etc.-- do they exist any more?), and we wrapped large purchases too big for the regular paper bags (no plastic bags) in brown paper, tied with string* from a big spool, like the one pictured, that sat on the floor, and attached a wooden handle. A lady who worked there was very good at it and she taught me.
I found a hard floor cleaner called a Bissel Flip jet or something like that. It was a vacuum and a floor cleaner in one. Worked good for a few months then it started leaking.
My friend found a Hienz ketchup bottle dated 1898 or 97 or something like that. He called them and they told him that their records show that their company was shut down that year and they made no bottles or something like that…for reasons I forget. So that was odd.
Somebody was growing or distilling on a level not for personal consumption.
You fight ignorance, Sir.
Thanks, I do my best; and I’m a Lady.
I beg your pardon.
You fight ignorance, Madame.
No worries!
To add my own anecdote, on cleaning the ducts of our 40 year old house I found an array of toy pieces and a strawberry-flavored condom wrapper. :eek:
