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What surprises did you find when the walls came down?

We are about 5 weeks into the kitchen renovation. Yes, I knew that there would be some unwelcome surprises when the old cabinets came out and the old walls and ceiling came down. Some were funny (an old light fixture with its bulb still in the original ceiling that was boxed into a fir down/ chase). Some were GROSS (lots of rat poop in that chase and on top of the metal plenum in the basement). Some were expensive, but covered by my termite policy (yards of termite damage in the plates, sills, joists, subfloor, etc.). Some were shocking, but would have been a bigger shock if found later (leaks in the stucco that had rotted out other plates and sills and left white mold on lots of wood). Some were inevitable in an old house remodel (shoddy wiring and plumbing from previous remodels). Some were just plain stupid (three inches taken out of a group of studs so the fridge could be "recessed").

Oh, yeah, a bunch of empty liquor bottles from the late 20's or early 30's when the house was built.

Whew. I'm ready to stop finding problems (electrician found hot knob and tube wiring yesterday), to be totally in the construction phase and out of the destruction phase.

Humor us with your stories!

Comments (38)

  • Shelley Graham
    9 years ago

    We've remodeled our whole house since we bought it from my parents almost four years ago. It's built in 1980...good construction, so we didn't anticipate any surprises when taking walls out. However, the drywall guys left behind three bottles of white port (still wrapped in paper bags) and a couple of cans of Rainier Ale. Hey, it's a dusty job...

  • schicksal
    9 years ago

    Our place was built in 1959 and remodeled in 1970 + a bigger remodel in 1979.

    2 rats (long deceased)
    A 1979 South Carolina universities football schedule
    Enough traces of paint, linoleum, wallpaper and countertop material to tell what the place looked like at any point in time (cool!!!)
    A Pepsi bottle from when the place was built
    Leftover tile from the original bathrooms that I wish were still there
    Headers from the original kitchen layout. One that was MUCH more functional than what they changed it to.
    Crappy plumbing work and electrical wires that were "fixed" with dried out duct tape.

  • Teehee1984
    9 years ago

    In our former house we found a picture of the former owner posed naked! Fully tanned and fully exposed! I think he was a porn star wannabe.

    In our recent remodel, I found out why our kitchen did not have a vent, which was one of the major reasons for the remodel. Turns out we did have a vent - a downdraft. Apparently the plans must have changed and they put the cabinets over the downdraft vent and put in double wall ovens instead. Had I known, i would have taken advantage of the built in downdraft and wouldn't have had to pay to vent through the roof. And it would have changed my layout. Oh well....down drafts don't work that well anyway, I suppose.....

  • caseykees
    9 years ago

    This isn't MY house, but back in the early 90's my mom and her husband tore down all but one wall of her husbands father's house that sat on a Bay and remodeled it completely. They found newspaper clippings under the old floor boards and discovered at one point, the house was on the other side of the Bay and they transferred it across the Bay when it was frozen one winter. I thought that was kind of neat.

  • scrappy25
    9 years ago

    Apparently former workers prior to our ownership left marijuana rolling tools in the space between the basement and first floor.

  • HerrDoktorProfessor
    9 years ago

    When we replaced the dishwasher on our first house we discovered a half-eaten burrito that had been used as a shim and had been there for 11 years.

    I kid you not a burrito for a shim.

  • Gooster
    9 years ago

    Ha ha, burrito shims and "highly personal" photos.

    Ours were more mechanical-- basically the entire sill plates had been notched out on the first story and essentially the siding was the only thing holding the first floor of a two story home together. Also, the existing vent hood didn't connect to anything and was just emptying into the space between the floors.

  • gardenerlorisc_ia
    9 years ago

    In an old farmhouse built probably in the '30's, there was dirt, newspaper and leaves for insulation between the floors and a wrecking bar hanging in a stud wall.

    They had finally got around to put plumbing in the kitchen and a bathroom when our family bought it in the '60's.

  • mudhouse_gw
    9 years ago

    When we started working on a 1940's farmhouse, we always made jokes about finding a jar of money. We only found a few hypodermic needles (past druggie owners) and broken toys. One day my DH came running to me all excited about a find in a crawlspace under the porch. "You've gotta see what I found! Come look!"

    I actually wriggled through the little opening on my belly, in the dirt, finally looked up and found myself face to face with a mummified chicken. DH thought it was great fun. I learned I can crawl in reverse really fast.

    (Love the burrito shim story!)

  • gyr_falcon
    9 years ago

    I don't have any remodel surprise stories to share, but I sure am enjoying reading yours! Chickens and burritos and revealing photos---oh, my! hahaha Those notches and wiring revelations are scary and, unfortunately, all too common. I'm sure our house has some hidden nightmares, too; we just haven't found them.

  • Hydragea
    9 years ago

    It's funny that so many people leave beverages in the walls...Maybe it's a tradesman's custom.

    Anyway, my surprise was that, when I took down the wall between the living room and dining room in my 1950's house, I found headers that indicated there had originally been about a 5' opening there.

    I always felt slightly guilty about opening up the house and making it open concept, but now I don't need to feel that way since that was how it was to begin with! I wish I'd known about this opening, because I would have designed it into the plan. Oh well.

  • zeebee
    9 years ago

    Much more benign here: a waste pipe that was so well hidden by an artful bumpout, even the GC didn't think anything could be in there. Minor change order to divert it once uncovered.

    Someone I know was updating one floor of her rowhouse and wanted to remove the final load-bearing wall to make an open loft-like room. When her structural engineer came to assess the job, they realized that the prior owner had removed all the other load-bearing walls on that floor AND the one above it and never put in ANY replacement beams. The house was being held together by air and prayers. The crew of the GC she hired to fix the problem took one look at it and walked off the job in fear of their safety.

  • mama goose_gw zn6OH
    9 years ago

    Money!! Actually it was only two coins, from the early 1980s, between the small closets that the previous owner's young daughters used. I can imagine him asking if they each wanted to leave a coin for a future owner to find. I left the coins and added one of my own, before replacing the wall board.

    I found the expected mouse droppings in the kitchen ceiling, and a nest and desiccated carcass under one of the base cabinets.

  • shuffles_gw
    9 years ago

    During a renovation, I found a pre-1915 (straight side) Coca Cola bottle in mint condition. The bottle says, "Coca Cola Bottling Works New Bern N. C. New Bern is where Pepsi Cola was invented.

  • albert_135   39.17°N 119.76°W 4695ft.
    9 years ago

    1983 or so I removed a bath tub fixture and the tub,with me in it fell into the basement.

  • jakuvall
    9 years ago

    my house-supposed to be a double joist under edge of tub. Mine had none, nor was there subfloor. The tub rested on a conglomeration of newspaper, chicken wire and tile.

    Most challenging-4 gas pipes in a wall we were moving that I was assured was empty. Pipes went to other apartments, had to redesign on the fly.

    My favorite at a clients- a squirrel skeleton, jaws clamped around a wire he had been chewing through prior to demise.

  • mama goose_gw zn6OH
    9 years ago

    albert135, you win!

  • HomeChef59
    9 years ago

    I can top it. This was my parents house, not mine. I was a minor, so I don't have any liability. We renovated the house when I was a child. Because I was the youngest and the smallest, I had to run wiring under house. (Electricians are amazed that I can fish wire.)

    The house was in downtown Atlanta, built in 1915. The unfinished basement was carved out of a steep hillside using a mule and plow. When they got deep enough for a cellar, they stopped digging at one point into the hill. The dug out area formed a partial cellar with cement floor and earthen wall. The rest of the basement was crawl space. The furnace and the washer dryer were in the basement.

    We used to put the dogs in the basement when we left the house. One day we came home. I opened the door to let the dogs upstairs. At the bottom of the stairs were a couple of white objects. I went down to see what the dogs had dug up. There were two bones. One was a rib bone and the other was the ball joint end and most of the thigh bone of a human.

    I called mom and we went exploring. The dogs had dug behind the washing machine where some bricks had been stacked up. Behind the bricks were more bones.

    My mom was an attorney. She has since passed away. She said we had better call the police. We had been living in the house for at least 10 years at this point. The little old lady we bought the house from had lived there for fifty years. Two of our neighbor's had lived there since the 1930's.

    The police sent out this poor rookie policeman who was scared to death and white as a ghost. So mom told him to take the bones to the coroner and gave him her business card.

    A week later the coroner called. He said that the bones were really old. He wasn't concerned about them, he was only concerned about last Saturday night's bones.

    We just put the bricks where we found them. We asked all of our long time neighbors if anyone had ever gone missing from the house, no one said yes. Our house was located in an area where the Battle of Atlanta had occurred. It was probably a war body.

    Somebody is going to ask. Did mom disclose the body in the basement when we sold the house? Hell no. Out of sight, out of mind. Rest in peace.

  • shuffles_gw
    9 years ago

    Good stories! I used to hear about renovators finding gold coins. No such story - yet!

  • momfromthenorth
    9 years ago

    These are really fun(ny) but Albert_135 I know you didn't enjoy going south in that bathtub!!

  • eam44
    9 years ago

    Not my house (my sister's) and not behind the wall - behind the wallpaper. A little note to the previous owner of the house "(insert four letter word here) you Barb." They found it when they removed the paper and have since painted over it, but I laugh every time I enter that bathroom. Apparently Barb was one tough cookie...

  • deedles
    9 years ago

    In the closet of the main bedroom we found the closet walls had been constructed by wallpapering over an old refrigerator wooden crate... Norge? Under the gold shag carpets we found a crazy quilt of used carpet pad chunks: sizes ranging from a few inches to a couple feet. Hundreds and hundreds (literally) of nails and staples holding all these crusty, dry and gross carpet pad scraps down. Apparently the former owner never met a type of building material that he couldn't (or wouldn't) scrounge for free.

  • Hydragea
    9 years ago

    Homechef, what an amazing story! Any ghosts wandering the halls?

  • HomeChef59
    9 years ago

    No, the ghosts were in a house that I renovated as an adult. That's another story.

  • texaspenny
    9 years ago

    When we took the drywall down on the sink wall we found that the sink vent pipe that went to the roof had disconnected and was venting into the wall. One whole section of drywall between the studs had mold but was hidden on the visible side by wallpaper. Also, the wiring in the wall behind the oven had a nail driven into it. When they removed the cabinets and drywall they saw it sparking.

  • infinitylounge
    9 years ago

    Streaming water and giant mushrooms. And here I felt foolishly paranoid, opening the wall just because the paint had started peeling a little bit.

    I guess that's the thing about plaster and lath. I feel like if it had been drywall, the mushrooms would have been inside the room already.

    It is not good to attach an electrical strike to a new roof with an unsealed bolt and then wait a few years.

  • MizLizzie
    9 years ago

    This is all so cool. Now I wanna hear HomeChef59's next story . . . Tell, tell.

  • threegraces
    9 years ago

    I was surprised to see that our insulation was basically made of mud and horsehair.

  • Kippy
    9 years ago

    Parents house was built in the late 1890's and not as a real house. In the 1920's it was converted to a house and sold in a new subdivision. (found the old papers tucked in the walls of the remodel of the cooks kitchen. You can see where the cook stove sat and the farm sink they did not even bother with finishing the walls.) Just discovered that the fireplace was built where there used to be a window that matched the other two. And that behind the wall, they cut through a stud to put a wood stove pipe through the wall.

    We were looking to see where the bees that used to live in the chimney-wall. While making a couple of peak holes in the cardboard for walls (1920's) and leaning on the masonry false front above the fireplace a cracked "secure" corner fell off and nearly hit us. We discovered the old window opening. (complete with the notches for the cord for the weights)

  • Elraes Miller
    9 years ago

    Not my home, my grandmother's farm house built long before the depression and had gone through a major flood in the late 40s. I went to visit it with hopes of going inside and memories my mom had living there as a child. The owners wouldn't let me in as it was being rented by some bikers. Sadly the next day it was torn down, why didn't the owners tell me this? The only thing they mentioned found was an old victorian shoe. But to this day I believe if I had been there during it's loss I would have found pages of books or trinkets mom had played with. She had a secret spot inside the staircase. And, to this day, I cannot understand why they wouldn't have told me this was a plan, let me walk through it just prior to demolition. Unless it was a danger to all and the city had condemned it. I was able to take a ton of photos of the exterior and had long talks with my aunt to create a floor plan. Built a large model of it inside and out, she was in awe. I never could figure out where mom's secret place was and my aunt had no clue either.

    This has been a fun read.

  • prairiemom61
    9 years ago

    I love this thread! We owned two old houses before building our current home 20 years ago. The second house was built in 1875, homesteaded by my DH's great, great grandparents. It was two rooms down, two up. Of course it had been added on to etc, but when we purchased it in 1987 we gutted the original two rooms downstairs to add heat, redo electrical etc. The walls were full of creek gravel that was used for insulation! (not effective!). But the most exciting find came when our contractor tore out the 1950's kitchen cabinets. He found a letter in the wall behind. It is the sweetest letter, from my DH's father to his fiance'. He was telling her the work they were doing, installing new cabinets and such, getting the house ready for her. He called her honey and sweetheart. We have that letter and treasure it. They raised a large family there and she passed away at age 41. The house is still in the family, going on 6 generations. Wonderful history there.

  • HomeChef59
    9 years ago

    Because you requested ghost stories:

    The house that had the body in the basement had a ghost, too. The previous owner had died in the backyard while putting chains on his tires on a snowy morning. His wife was an invalid and was unable to get outside to him.

    For years we would stand at the stove and look sideways down the kitchen to the kitchen door window. You would see a shadowy presence in the doorway. We always called him Mr. Livesy. Our family always treated him with the utmost respect.

    The house that I renovated had a ghost, too. The house was built in 1854 by slave labor. It was on a very prominent hill in a small town in Northern Virginia. The town switched sides over 50 times during the War Between the States. On a clear day you could see all the way to the Fairfax County Courthouse and you could have observed troop movement down the dirt roads. The views from the top of the roof were fabulous.

    It was a center hall floor plan. One day our GC was working in a room at the top of the staircase at the end of the upstairs center hall. He had some lumber stacked in the hallway. The room had windows at both ends of the room. Both windows were open. He thought he heard me come into the house. He went into the hallway to greet me. Suddenly, the lumber tumbled to the floor, each window spontaneously closed.

    It scared this guy to death. He was a biker in a former life and steady as a rock. I came home to find him sitting there white as a ghost.

    We had two large dogs at the time. They would stand at the bottom of the stairs and bark at the top of the stairs where the lumber had been stacked.

    Because of my experience growing up with the ghost of Mr. Livesy, I decided to make friends with our Virginia ghost. Whenever the dogs started to bark at the ghost I would go into the hallway and speak to the ghost gently. I thanked it for it's presence, assured it that it was welcome and suggested that it move away from the dogs.

    We got along just fine. The dogs stopped barking and all was well. It was a beautiful house with a historic history. I miss the house, but don't miss the heating bill. I wonder if the ghost misses us.

  • loveswindowsanddogs_gw gw
    Original Author
    9 years ago

    Your stories are so much fun to read. Thank you so much for taking the time to share! Clearly, there are some common threads: booze, shoddy construction and shortcuts, RATS, historical tidbits... And the crazy stuff: mushrooms (ACK! and I thought my white mold was bad), a mummified chicken, a burrito shim⦠But a skeleton? That takes the cake!
    Come on, virtual friends, tell more!

    BUMP

  • williamsem
    9 years ago

    A live lead just dangling inside the wall behind the range. It had a bit of tape on the end, but still live and gave one of the workers a jolt.

    In the basement none of the outlets were attached to studs. The drywall came off and they were all dangling there, swinging free. Plus one heating vent covered. And in the drop ceiling was a lighting base used as a junction box, but three wires went through it and one was linked over the edge so you couldn't add a light to it. Plus the outlet next to the breaker box that was used as a new circuit because the box was full - had four seperate feeds going out of it. All now corrected by my GC, thankfully.

    The upstairs bath did not have the sink pipes connected right, apparently they were just dry fitted together and thankfully never separated.

  • robo (z6a)
    9 years ago

    Completely inadequate header above a couple of pocket doors, missing vapour barrier and also just some random plastic sheeting instead of vapour barrier. Judging by this thread we got off very lightly!!

    Also found a live, covered up stove outlet in a hallway outside our old kitchen.

  • beachpea3
    9 years ago

    In our first home. a 1780 cape in the Berkshires, we found a knapsack that belonged to the original owner who had fought in the American Revolution. We had it framed and left it for the next owner who then moved the house. We like to think that the knapsack has stayed in its original spot! (Those walls were of horsehair and mud and tree trunks were beams in the attic.)

    In our most recent renovation of a c. 1680 Saltbox, when we took down the plastered walls on two sides of the kitchen we found a "petrified" snake that was about 5 feet long and two live wires just hanging out...It is a wonder that we did not have a fire in the kitchen sometime over the last 30 years! We were hoping to find all kinds of treasures.....not a snake and fire hazards!

  • honorbiltkit
    9 years ago

    Last February, a water pipe in my second floor suffered catastrophic failure while I was across town. By the time I returned and got the water off, plaster from downstairs ceiling had come crashing down and the basement was flooded.

    I had to remove considerable wallboard from the basement apartment in order to keep from growing exotic mold on and within the walls. In the ceiling of the bedroom, I discovered that two of the joists below my dining room floor had in fact been badly burned at some point.

    {{gwi:2140613}}

    The dark stuff is the charred wood; the light residue is the mold before I sprayed it with bleach. Please note that the guy who sold me the house had just packed insulation around the remaining joist and drilled a hole in it to run the electrical wire. [He had, however, sistered a more badly burned joist.]

    What is shocking is that for over 30 years I have been vaguely aware of a patched bit in my 110-year-old pine dining room floor and a softness underfoot, but I just thought it must be from the gradual deterioration of an old brick townhouse.

    Ya' think maybe ADD types ought not be permitted to buy real estate without supervision?

  • aviastar 7A Virginia
    9 years ago

    My DH and I live in an 1840 log home ( also in a small Northern Va town west of Fairfax, HomeChef!). It was lovingly maintained until the 70's and then badly neglected for the next 35 years. We found the original board and batten siding under some asbestos shingle siding, in good enough shape to save, probably two or three complete cars in the yard, bottles and coins in the chinking between the exposed logs inside-one with a note from the previous occupants, who must have put it there when the chinking was patched, straw as insulation under the metal roof, and the remnants of a second stone wall to match the one we have that didn't fall down.