Strangest Thing that Came with Your House

I've you've ever bought a "used" house, you may have found some strange fixture or item of decor installed by a previous owner. Our house had three prior owners, and one of them put in a doorbell that plays "Dixie". It was a riot. It was like something out of "You might be a redneck..." (Please don't be offended if you have a doorbell that plays "Dixie". I have never lived in The South, so this was just too strange for me.)

Hope I don't offend anyone here either, but it was very strange to walk into a kitchen with brilliant deep brickred walls, white cabinets and blue countertops! Yikes, guess the first thing I did???

The woman who lived here before me installed a husband, then left the house and him. So he came with the house when I moved in. I've had him for 16 years, so I've decided to just keep him. :>) (sometimes he is mighty strange though!).

edited for spelling

This message was edited Nov 11, 2003 2:50 PM

Strangest thing in my house was a TINY (long and narrow) room off the dining room, and the fact that the dining room window was smack up against a corner. Turns out the man (a plasterer) who built this house had 2 daughters and one came back home with a toddler. He "divided" off part of the dining room for a kid's bedroom, hence the window being offset. He did a wonderful job of re-creating the curve at the top of the walls to the ceiling in both rooms, making it look like the tiny room was intentional from the beginning.

Another thing was a 2 foot wide wall protrusion of 4" into the kitchen between the sink and back door. Turned out to be a false "wall" hiding the plumbing vent to the roof since the walls are concrete block. I made good use of the top half of that space by taking out the drywall and putting in narrow shelves and a hinged door with a cork board on the outside. Now I have a quite large spice/herb cabinet that stays cooler than the rest of the room and is light-free to keep the spices viable longer, plus a cork board for notes, grocery lists and a calender on the outside.

Our kitchen came with tile floors and counter tops. The tile is a yellowish color and some of the tiles have flowers and leaves on them in yellow, orange, and green. The wallpaper was white with tiny yellow and orange flowers. You'd think it would match the tile but it really didn't. We took it down and there where markings on the wall from prior wallpaper. The pattern was flower power daisies. I was very afraid. ;-)

Anyway, I wanted to have the walls painted a color that went well with the tile, so I got a bunch of paint chips to compare and what looked the best was avocado green. So the kitchen is painted avocado green. I'm sure whoever lives here next will find that quite bizarre.

Great conversions you did there darius.
LOL Joan, glad you got to like him after moving in!

There is a 'room' under the back porch, which is accessible with a 4'x4' opening, and a 4'x4' opening in the fruit cellar. Never have opened it up, because there are several locks to open. And no keys to match.

What is in there? A treasure chest? Tools? Boxes of stuff? A b_dy?

It is hard to say.

oooo dolddog, I wouldnt have been able to resist that. To explore the unknown, to explore an attic in an old house and find treasures is one of my dreams.

golddog, I'd HAVE to investigate that space, LOL!

How long have you lived there golddog?? Are you buying the house or renting it?? I'd say if I was buying it I would have already took the bolt cutters to those locks. I couldn't stand not knowing what was in there!! The fact that it has more than 1 lock on it, would make me think there is something in there worth seeing! How do you stand NOT knowing?!!
As for the house we live in, it came with many strange things indeed. The wash room is just off the kitchen and the door leading to it is all of 17" wide! Needless to say every laundry basket I have has cracks and breaks in it because I have to cram it thru the door! Some baskets have to be turned sideways to get them in or out of the room! I hate that door. But the way the house is made it can't really be made to be wider because of the kitchen cabinets.
If that wasn't bad enough, the diniing room was painted the brightest color of neon blue you have ever seen!!! One bedroom was paited dark pink, the other was painted the same blue as the dining room and trimmed out with get this dark ORANGE base boards and window trim!
Not to mention all the peep holes that were in the walls! One from the living room into the 1st bedroom, another from the back bedroom to the Master bedroom!
Strange folks must have lived here then!!
The list goes on and on!!

The house we rented just after we were married had an assortment of ashtrays and shot glasses left in the cupboards........

..........and a game called "Dirty Words."

So far, I think the "prize" is to Joan whose husband came with the house, LOL!

Hmmm... I don't know... It sounds like Mollybee is living in a former "house of ill repute".

MOLLYBEE, orange base boards and neon blue walls may very well be back in vogue soon. A good suggestion.LOL As for peep holes. Can you imagine any good reason for them? I mean good reason.LOL

I bought the house in 1990. So it's has been a few years for whatever is in there to 'mature'. Probably just a big box of money.:)

golddog, When and if you decide to open it up and take a peek you should call Jeraldo (sp?) He can do a whole show about it and score big ratings even if it turns out to be empty!

Zanymuse, a good idea! I may even sell popcorn and Pepsi. Do you think Jerry Springer would do, if Geraldo can't make it?

There was a big storage area under my grandparents' porch. That's where they kept the coal. There was a small door on the outside and a regular-sized door in the basement.

Yeah, a coal storage area sounds about right. The house has three chimneys. One in the back TV room, one in the kitchen, and one in the living room. Although there is a coal shute(SP) in the back as well.

I will give Jerry a call.LOL

LOL Springerr will come if you cdn guarantee something juicy is in there but I'd stick with Geraldo since he has experience in promoting empty vaults. But you might have to tell him a gangster used the place as a hide out many years ago.

Darn, wish I could get in on this thread, but my place didn't even come w/a house. Wahhhhh....!

Joan, yours came with a wonderful belonging in it! (Great perspective, by the way!)

(Hmmm...I did live once in a 3-room shotgun apt that had a skinny staircase hidden in the teeny kitchen pantry that went to UNDER the house, where I discovered a door, hidden behind a shelf-type thingy. That was where I first learned of the McGorkle Brothers. But perhaps another time, eh?)

Maybe one or several of the bodies that some mass murderer has stowed for safe keeping. Mass murderers love places like that. I haven't been watching too much TV 'cause stuff like that isn't shown on my beloved HGTV. LOL!

Check out Countrygardens' post a little further down. I have heard of things iike that in the past and have also known of murderers that buried their victims in the gardens and were foolish enough to move away leaving the bodies behind. If I ever had to move, it would take a lifetime to sort out my stuff but at least I wouldn't have to carry any tell tale bodies with me. (at least none that I can remember because of the onset of Oldstimers disease. LOL)

This message was edited Nov 12, 2003 8:58 AM

Horseshoe, that shotgun apt. sounds like it will fit this thread very well. McGorkle Brothers? Anything like Brooks Brothers?

I bought my house from the couple who had actually built the house. She was about 4 foot tall so her husband built the counter tops to suit her height. I never noticed it while looking at the house, or until I did my first sink full of dishes and came away with a backache. Canning is always a rotten chore because of them.

ONE day I'll have them fixed! When I win the lottery!!

Well now, there was no house on our land when we bought it so I have no tales of weird rooms or peep holes and the like, but we did have a resident critter that moved while we were building our house and chose not to reveal himself until after we moved in. One day I went to the basement on some errand where DW was priming trim for me to put up. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard a kerplop right at my feet; and there lay a black snake of sizable proportions who immediately slithered off on the general direction of DW. Not wanting to frighten her, I said, "Hey Cape why not take a break upstairs"; she responded that she had too much work to do and she'd take a break when she felt like it thank you very much. The snake was fast approaching her so I finally said, "Well dear, if you don't go upstairs you're going to share the basement with a black snake." She gave me one of those special looks reserved for special occasions - then she spotted the snake. Ever see a 5'3" woman levitate? I have.

As for the colors coming back in style...not here they wont!

Along with all the peep holes, there were tons of knife marks in the walls. Only thing we could figure was they used the walls for knife throwing. Only thing it could have been, because it was 2" long holes that only a knife would have made. Strange people!! Or some mighty mean teenagers!

This is a great thread, ROTFALMBO! My strange item was a wall plaque in the shape of a parrot. Obviously done by a novice in a ceramics class, it was painted in colors that would have made HP Lovecraft cringe, LOL. I used to tease my son that if he wasn't a good boy, I'd hang the parrot on the wall and make him stare at it for hours. He still laughs about that.

We had a lot of fun with that atrocity, one year we wrapped it up and made believe it was grandma's Christmas present. The look on Mom's face was priceless, since she knew the history behind it. I still have it (in a shoebox in the closet) and of course can't part with it now.

When I moved into my used house, there was a pink piano in the basement. The basement had been finished and the opening at the ceiling and the stairs was smaller than when the piano was put into the basement. So the piano came with the house. I don't play the piano and I'm not a basement person (too creepy and dampish) so it sits forlornly and forgotten for the next owner to puzzle out how to get the thing out of the basement.

Our house is 100 years old so there are always surprises... When we moved in it was spring and there was a huge old tree in the yard not yet leafed out. The previous owner said it was always late to leaf out and to be patient. HA! It was dead, and we had to pay to have it removed. And then the neighbors told us it had been dead since the previous summer.
They also told us the house "had cable" and sure enough there were cable tv fixtures in the bedrooms and in the tv room. In fact the tv room had a black coax cable still trailing from the wall into the room when we moved in. But when we went to have it connected, we found out that the cable company never had run cable to the house! So we took the plates off the wall and there was nothing behind the plates!
Eileen

When we bought our farm it came with a 90+ year old farm house with a light that came on willy nilly. No matter what one did and yes I did get an electrician in to check it all out, no one could figure out why it would come on. At that point in time we were still living 3 hours away in the'big' city and only coming down on weekends and holidays. There was a rash of robberies and 2 different neighbours called the local constabulary to report this light on when we weren't home. Imagine our surprise when we turned up on Friday night with huge footptints all around the house. Forget the light, I thought the Abominable Snowman had moved to Ontario - and it was just footsteps of the police who were doing their job, wading around in waist deep snow checking for a phantom light turner on.D

We bought a berm home or basement home, some people call it. The bottom floor is basically concrete walls, concrete floors, all covered with paneling, sheetrock, linoleum, etc.

Last year our kitchen sink plugged up and we tried like crazy to get it undone. Used a snake, you know all that we could. Decided we needed to replace a portion of the pipe as it had so many angles there was no way we were going to get it unclogged.

After purchasing new pipe, DH went to replace it and found out that the pipe was laid down and then the concrete poured over it.

Guess what we had to do....The old pipe is still in the concrete, minus a section where we had to cut and put a hole to the outside and put in new pipe!!!

We are still wondering "What was he thinking????"

Misty I assume by what was he thinking means the builder. He really wasn't thinking much at all.

He knew all along that what he was doing was fast easy and cheap.

The same thing happened with my main watter supply line which was placed under the garage floor and not insulated.
the bozo poured concrete right on top of the pipe and the pipe layed in sand. Along came a little electrolisis and my pump ran every 10 minutes with all the valves shut off.

One very long Saturday afternoon and many language cries from the house and we had water again that only ran when you open a valve.

Three years ago my niece called me and asked me to come look at her new house. Her husband thought some of the studs were substandard. I went to look and said this is ok except for this one, this one and so forth.About twenty substandard studs a few still had bark on the edges in places,large knots, and powder beetle holes. My answer tell the contractor to replace them and stand firm. The contractor did but really was miffed when Mark told him what I said. Would you use this in your own house.

This is one of the pitfalls you get when unscruptious builders build things. Ernie

Ernie, this sounds like the HGTV show, Holmes on Homes.....the horror tales........gosh!..Mine is kinda similar to some of these thread stories...Moved in 37 years ago, to the home we are still in! Every wall was painted a chartreuse green......kitchen, bathroom, living, dining, etc!!! Being a newlywed, I could envision other colours on all the walls....thankgoodness, as today the retro chartreuse is back in! What goes 'round, comes 'round! Elaine

When we bought our house you couldn't see the property for the 12 foot weeds covering it. After the weeds came down (love those goats!) we found 25 55 gallon barrels full of garbage including 3 and a half barrels FULL of needles and syringes due to the former owner's heroin habit. In the house we found the entire living room, more than half the dining room, half the bathroom, and the entire kitchen were all on one electical circuit. The former owner was an electrician!!!!!

Also found a locked room in the garage. When we cut that lock there was 50 plus very large garbage bags FULL of beer cans and bottles.

Misty Meadows, our pipes were dug into the earth 18 inches below the concrete slab that our house was then built on. It will take a jack hammer the entire length of our house to replace our water lines.

When I moved in, the electrical fixtures were original. 1930's. Strange brown 'things' hanging down in each room. Low enough that you had to duck or get banged. The receptacles, some kind of glass material, should have been saved. They could go into a museum, I'm sure.

The wiring, knob and tube, was in good shape (I thought), but the insurance guy that came to see what was what, didn't like knob and tube. And I didn't either. The previous owners said they just had the house rewired. Sure. So I learned wiring at a local school and rewired the whole house. A lot of the connections were hand twisted and wrapped in tape. But not the usual 3 thicknesses. The connections were not in a box.

And of course 60 amps. With 2 old air conditioners and a bunch more on one circuit.

I started my own electrical business (Reliable Electrical Service) after that. I believe the majority of houses around here are ready to catch on fire with their faulty wiring.

Anyhow, it is probably best to hire someone to inspect a house before you buy it. If you find something wrong, you will than have something to bargain with to bring down the price.

PS The roof was new. But was on 2 layers of old shingles that were moldy. I guess it is easier to just put the shingles on top. No scraping and hauling.

But, oh well, I wouldn't have it any other way. I love old houses. If was to buy a new house or an old house. I would take the old house every time. They have character.

Some great stories on this thread!!
I've nothing as good as any of them, but when we moved in it was what we didn't find LOL!
The previous owners were supposed to move out by midday, so we arrived and sat and waited....and waited....and waited...
Eventually they went at 9pm!! by which time, being February, it was DARK
The charming people hadn't left us a single light bulb!
The sort of thing you don't forget, even after 30+ years LOL

The other thing they left were some little pattering footsteps - as if a child was trotting across the front bedroom floor. We never saw anything. However, a couple of weeks after we moved in a neighbour asked if we had heard our 'ghost'! Apparently a little girl had died in that room some years before and most of the neighbours knew about the footsteps.
It never seemed nasty - and after our children were born we didn't hear it again - I always felt it was satisfied that happy people were there now and it didn't need to hang around any more.

When we purchased the house before this one the previous owners had some unusual taste. The kitchen walls were all done with mushroom yellow and green contact paper. I am sure you have all seen that print! It had been put over dark brown paneling. But my favorite was the dining room which was painted pumpkin orange. The floor was half shag carpet and half linoleumn, we decided the kids must have had to eat on the linoleumn side and adults ate on the shag carpet. Needless to say they were all eliminated very rapidly.
Our house now has not been nearly so exciting, except that everywhere I have dug to make a new garden bed, I have unearthed enough beer cans and bottles to make me wonder how they managed to get the walls as straight as they are.

A couple thoughts about golddog's "spare room". How far are you from NY city? There are still some unaccounted for mafia types.
About a year ago someone in twin cities area found a trunk with 2 childs corpse in it. They think they were in there 20 years. Just was on the news the other day that they still haven't a clue. The person that would know died a number of years ago!

Our house has a ugly green carpet over a nice maple floor.
When someone painted the woodwork a very dark brown, they painted the 2" or so of the carpet also. Never heard of masking.
It is finaly coming out this winter in our remodeling project. We will have the wood loors redone. They are in very good shape & should turn out beautiful.
We have a 1930's electric range in the basement.
It is so heavy, I don't know how they ever got it down there. I'm hoping someday it will be worth something as an antique. LOL
Bernie

I love all these stories, great thread!

My house came with 2 plaster dolphins flanking the front door. Have no clue why they were there in the first place. A friend painted them one summer evening after a couple of glasses of wine, and named them "Fred and Ginger", LOL.

Golddog where I live the insurance companies won't write a new policyif a house has knob and tube electrical.

All the electrical I have seen done that way has another problem. The insulation has asbestos in it making it illegal to distrub without a permit and documented disposal at a proper haz mat disposal site.

The dreaded popcorn plaster that started being sprayed on in the late sixties also contained asbestos untill around mid to later seventies.

Recently we over hauled the house I built in 72 when I got the permit I also got a form form from the air polution authority which I leaft in the mail box for about three months because I knew what it was going to say. Anyway I took off all the popconr and disposed of the garbage the right way but did not pay a state certified contractor to build a tent over my house and charge me thousands to do what I did in two days. If I get cancer from it I suppose I won't be able to sue R.J.R. tobacco.

Yes even having my own house built I got stuck in a place or two.

How many of you have the dreaded popcorn in your ceilings?Ernie

Ernie... I HATE those popcorn ceilings. When I built a 2 story addition for my mother several years ago, the drywall finishers sprayed a paint finish that is called "orange peel" which looked like tiny flat bits of wet drywall compound mixed in the paint. It looked wonderful, but painting over it a year later left a flat finish. Not the same as the problems painting over the popcorn finishes.

There is still some knob and tube wiring in the older houses here in Asheville. Unless you are updating any wiring in the house, it is acceptable and "grandfathered" in the City Code. I wouldn't buy a house with it but it's certainly safer than any hidden old aluminum wiring.