What did prior homeowners leave you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Things Nobody Tells You:

I lived in at least half a dozen apartments before I bought my house (and I’ll get to that in a minute). Every time I moved into an apartment, I’d open the broiler part of the stove and behold, the previous tenants had left behind their roasting pan. Dumbasses. So, upon moving out, I’d grab the thing and take it with me, along with anything else the previous tenants had left that I wanted. Flash forward to last summer when I bought my house, and knowing I now have a collection of roasting pans (supreme irony: I’m a vegetarian who lives alone so I have exacty ZERO use for a large-ass roasting pan.), I finally asked the landlady: “Do stove manufacturers give you a roasting pan with the stove?” Apparently, after ten years or so, the light bulb went off and I thought to ask. “Yeah,” she said, “They put it in the broiler.”

OOooooops. :smack:

So I left that one there. :smiley: On to my list of stuff the previous homeowners left me:

• A really ugly, smallish cedar tree which my neighbors and I promptly lopped down.
• A really great hidey-hole location that only I know about (well, me and the previous owners, who showed me where it was.)
• A beautiful collection of stained and etched glass windows, both installed and stashed in strange locations.
• Many, many, many matchbox cars and trucks – usually I find 'em buried in the backyard in the flower beds.
• A really cool antique cast iron fireplace cover. I’ve seen ‘em on ebay for loads of money.
• A skittish yellow cat who does not match any of my other pets, but thankfully, lives under my house, terrorizing all the other neighborhood street cats. (I do not feed her; I believe my retired neighbors do.) She doesn’t care how much my dogs bark at her; she was there first!
• Two beautiful Butia or Pindo Palm trees.
• A concrete pagoda in the front yard (too heavy to move).
• A clean slate, in terms of the yard. It was all dirt and leaves and is slowly becoming Butterfly Garden.
• Someone practiced their As on the ceiling of what was the kids’ room. In pen, pencil and crayon.
• Really ugly pink and blue flowery curtains, which I promptly ripped down and used for paint or staining rags.
• Every can of paint ever used in the house… so I could touch up.

Nothing really cool, like some of the treasure y’all have found.

22

You didn’t expect them to leave a new plunger, did ya?

:smiley:

23

<<Well, rats, GraphicsGal - you stole my thunder!!>>

Well, FairyChat, your story was much more colorful than mine :wink:

24

Oh, but I did find a new roasting pan in the broiler, which apparently…

comes with the stove.

:cool:

25

A bong and roach clip, hidden behind a loose wallboard in a finished attic. (At least, we *think * they were a bong and roach clip; we had to look them up in an encyclopedia).

What did we leave for the buyers of our last house? Receipts and contact information for the new roof, schematics of all the house circuits (lots of upgrades while we lived there).

26

In the house we moved into when I was 9, we found a pair of pink shorts and a pair of crutches (both in the rafters of the laundry room) and a humongous jar of bacon grease (under the kitchen sink).

My mother recently had the basement ceiling torn out (different house) and down came a bag with some coins & jewelry–nothing terribly valuable, but still worth a little bit of money.

27

Some of the stuff our prior owner left behind:

[ul]
[li]a rusty, old, nasty sickle (we hope that’s rust)[/li][li]an open bag of Quikrete[/li][li]a used car battery[/li][li]two mildewey shower curtains from the local no-tell motel[/li][li]a small cubicle (seriously - it’s in the basement and we use it for “privacy” for the litter box)[/li][li]a sticky back issue of “Black Tail” magazine[/li][/ul]
When my parents moved into their current house (about 19 years ago) they found a box in the garage filled with headless dolls. No idea where the heads are.

28

A grow room and a canister of CO2. At least the everpresent pot smell the neighbors talk about seems to have disappeared.

Now the grow room stores old baby clothes and camping equipment.

29

When my family moved to Montreal, the previous homeowner left us several boxes of semi-precious stones, a large bag of cheap-ass pens and letter openers in little velour boxes, a very large collection of pruning shears (it looked like each season he had thought, “This year I’m going to tackle those rose bushes,” bought a pruning shears, and promptly forgot about it), two very cool swords (not sharp), and a subscription to Playboy.

When I moved into my second apartment, the previous tenant left me a large circular cookie sheet and a drain clog that could have levelled Tokyo.

30

As requested …

The background: my friend Keri and I were fresh out of our first year of college, living in the Boston area. We’d subleted a nice place for the summer (which included a friendly and concerned ghost who’d blink the lights until we locked the door at night), lived a month in the roach-infested crack house, then found a relatively nice place in an extraordinarily Italian neighborhood (read: The Family–and this is coming from someone who grew up in Tony Soprano’s hometown–how many other people you know have to pay the rent in cash?). It was a two-family house, with no one upstairs. The landlord told us that we weren’t allowed to keep stuff in the basement, and that we probably shouldn’t even go down there.

Well … wouldn’t you be curious?

The second day we lived there, the curiosity finally overcame us, and we trekked down to the dark, dank, probably spider-infested basement. There was the general run of crap down there that accumulates in a house that’s over fifty years old, and has seen many different tenants. But in the center of the basement floor was … something … covered in a dingy sheet.

Again, wouldn’t you be curious?

Taking off the sheet, we found an absolutely gorgeous chandelier. Gold plated or painted or whatever, very intricate, red glass (crystal? it looked wicked expensive) ornamentation, just the absolute picture of lavish home decor.

What was a chandelier this beautiful doing in the basement? And more puzzling than that, where the hell did it come from? No house in the area was fancy enough for that thing. And why was it suddenly freezing in the basement?

Keri and I went back upstairs and didn’t think about it again. And we also didn’t cover the damned thing up.

Couple days later, we went into the upstairs apartment to check that out, since the realtor had given us a key in case anybody came by to look at it. In the smallest of the three bedrooms, we found gaily patterned jungle wallpaper … and a reddish-brown rusty spot on the floor that trailed into the living room.

Nah, that can’t be blood … they wouldn’t be showing the apartment in that condition … nah, can’t be.

Fast forward a couple weeks. Since the day after we’d moved in, Keri and I had both not been sleeping well. I was having brutal nightmares, and I’d begun sleepwalking again, something I hadn’t done in months. One night, Keri found me upstairs in the vacant apartment, still asleep, rocking back and forth in the smallest bedroom, crying and saying something to the effect of “Don’t do that, Daddy.” I have absolutely no memory of going up there.

The next night, she found me in the basement, sitting on the floor in front of the chandelier, just staring. After getting me back upstairs and into bed, Keri went downstairs and used that same sheet to recover the chandelier, something it hadn’t even occurred to us to do before. The nightmares and sleepwalking stopped immediately. And the stain in the upstairs bedroom disappeared.

A couple months later, another two of our friends moved in. About a week after that, I started sleepwalking again, and everyone in the house complained of nightmares. Then we discovered that Corey had been down in the basement and he’d uncovered the chandelier. Covered that sucker right up again, let me tell you.

A neighbor who’d lived in the house next door for more than fifty years once hinted that something very bad had happened in the house, but I never had the courage to find out what it was. Our landlord sold the house while we were still living there, and our new landlord gutted the upstairs apartment, planning on doing ours as soon as we moved out. One day he knocked on our door and said “You know where that chandelier in the basement came from?”

So, we told him what had happened, and why he had to keep it covered. He threw it out that day–took it all the way to the dump himself rather than keep it in the house. Hell, at least he believed us.

31

Latest apartment - i found a poorly made cat of nine tails.

Makes a good cat toy for the wee beasties.

32

Woah, creepy tale Draelin, hope I don’t get anything like that when I move out into the world, I think I could cope witht he friendly ghost, but I could do without night mares and sleepwalking. :eek:
Thanks for the story

thinks of number of deaths in college in the past, considers leaving light on tonight

33

stuff that we found in our house when we moved in…
in the laundry room:
*vacuum belts (no vacuum obvioisly)
*silicon seal- dried up in the tube
*a huge pile of new lightswitch & plug covers
*some old cleaning products
*a plunger- used
*partially used roll of crappy contact paper- really old (see in the kitchen)

in the garage:
*huge roll of insulation
*and outboard moter mount
*boxes of extra floor tiles
*paint cans, some that hadn’t been open, but were way old
*some cheap garden tools
*terra cotta pots

in the kitchen:
*more cleaning products
*a roll of paper towels (maybe they were being nice)
*really crappy contact paper inside the drawers/cupboards
*old toothbrush (under the sink) :eek:eeewwww (probably for cleaning- but out it went!!)

That was about it. Nothing really gross, except for that toothbrush, or cool.

34

When I moved into a house in North Carolina in 1993, the previous owner left behind a pool table in the basement because the cost of shipping such a large, heavy item would have been ridiculously expensive. He had furnished the basement with a bar and a pool table in order to entertain guests and throw wild parties on those occasions when he was home from his job as a commercial airline pilot. During my six years in North Carolina, the easy access to a pool table and its accessories gave me the opportunity to improve my game without wasting any time or money at downtown bars or clubs.

35

I remember mentioning this recently, but am too lazy to find the thread.

We found a broken vacuum cleaner up in the attic, an attic accessible by a hole in the ceiling and a ladder; not one with a pull-down stair.
Why would you drag a broken vacuum cleaner up a ladder to the attic? Much easier to just throw it out.

36

Four houses ago we found a metal advertising sign for a restuarant at the Chicago stockyards. Yummmmm let’s go eat meat just off the hoof, still warm and steamy; shades of “Resturant at the End of the Universe.” We keep moving it and hanging it up, lol.

37

Other than the normal stuff (i.e. paint cans, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.), the last tenant left some stuff I could never use knowing someone else has:

Dirty dish scrubbers (used)
An old plunger
An old toilet brush (used)
and laundry baskets

These things gross me out - how could you leave that kind of stuff behind? Just throw it away!!

Sheesh!

38

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

39

Four dead mice, an open can of speghittos, a gun and some kind of tool, but we could never identify what it is.

40

A foot-thick stack of tractor feed printer paper, the kind with the pink and yellow duplicate copy sheets… with beer logos across the tops of each page. I don’t remember which brands… it’s about 6 or 7 logos all in a row. These stacks were in the attic, by the way, and were the only things in the attic…