What goodies have you found under the floor?

[DNS1]

Did a partial re-wire last week for a friend who lives in a 1900s house (lights wired with rubberised cable!)

Found about 20kg of lead pipe under the floor when jemmying up boards... Thank you very much, that will make a few quid at the scrappy!

That a normal sort of thing to find in an older house?! I don't have much dealing with pre-1950s properties...

Anyone got any stories of valuable things found under floors and in lofts?!

 

[Andyfm]

I found a 2000 watt lamp in a loft years ago, it came from a war time floodlight I think, I still got it somewhere

 

[p11jor]

Fitting a light in allerton (south Liverpool) found a firearm

 

[Tomhw100]

lifted a board in a old couples toilet when i was doing my apprenticeship and found the old boys ****ography stash! we all had a butchers at that...also when we rewired a old cottage in south wealde we found victorian **** under the floorboards...if you could call it **** it would of been well naughty back in them days though- and then when the house was sold Jodie Marsh bought it so it was quite fitting actualy!

 

[Gravid]

Been on a job, proper old house, where the builders had found an old bra and a bottle of poison in like a cupboard half way up the stairs that had been plastered over. Must have been a builders joke from back in the day. Know a plasterer who hides cock n balls sculptors about people's houses ...strange lad.

 

[Stuuk1]

A guy at the company I work for found two packages under some boards, unwrapped one and it was a Lugar wrapped in oil to preserve it. The other wrap contained a load of live bullets, again wrapped in oil.

 

[grantr37]

Found a mini maglite torch and it worked

wonder if that was lying under there for a few years? they have been around for about 25 years now...(the mini version)

 

[grantr37]

Most of them are probably mine, so I will PM you my address so you can return them to me cheers.

found a screwdriver, a hacksaw and a pair of pliers on top of ceiling tiles in one room doing some refurb work at castlemilk highschool in Glasgow a few years ago, were tatty and the vent boy seemed to like the look of them so I gave them to him for his toolbag...

 

[grantr37]

I seem to find random pages from **** mags under floorboards, in walls etc. Found loads of gay **** sealed inside a partition wall in my own house. Bummer.

I find it interesting finding old newspapers and where folk have signed the wall etc. years and years ago.

Was bricking up an old fireplace last year and found the chimney full of shoes. Apparently the last owner had a bit of a fetish.

there's always norp in student halls, in all kinds of random places, chucked over the top (down the back) of built in wardrobes, in meter cupboards and behind built in desks.....was ripping out some old fitted desk lamps years ago and pulled a wooden panel off the side of a desk, there was 6 mini sized (I think they were 250ml ) cans of budwieser unopened in there, they don't make those any more....were well out of date, some student had stuck them in there to hide them from their roommate about 20 years before and forgotten all about them...they are probably in their 40's with a family now and the beer was still there...LOL .....strangest thing I found was a set of dumbell weights hidden in a wall space and also found some old 1980's VHS "gentlemans entertainment" films....people wanted to see what was on them but no VHS players anymore....lol...

 

[grantr37]

Was working on an old post office being converted to 2 flats they were replacing the whole floor when they lifted if up they found £200,000 worth of gold sovereigns in a box they gave it to the owner of the property and she gave the 5 men working onsite £5000 each for being so honest

somebody probably either hid that there during WW1 as it was their life savings from a business/inheritance or something, then got sent off to war and killed and never returned for them, or during WW2 incase we got invaded and never survived to go back for them, there must have been 75 or 80 coins there....

 

[grantr37]

sent apprentice under floor to check cable routes and he came back up with a loaded gun /not in his pants ,
silly bugger picked it up
site was shut down and never did get to do the job

A lot of military men coming back after world war 1 and world war 2 brought guns home with them and kept them, either for trophy/sentimental reasons or because there had been a war and they didn't want to rely on there not being another one....nobody was counting the things as they were everywhere and nobody cared as everybody was celebrating the end of the War...
Back in the old days, people didn't need a licence or to register either, so there were a lot circulating about, to the extent that it would not be unusual for a child to own say, for example, an old Colt revolver....
These days that would get 5 1/2 years in jail plus 6 months for each round present.....they even jailed active duty soldiers and marines for having guns outside base, which in my opinion is going overboard.....if they don't trust them with guns why should we trust the cops with them, they can go on a mental episode and shoot someone as well, and would get away with it if they did, which is worrying...

 

[Rampantchilli]

ive found tins stuffed with jewellery under the floor, and biscuit tins full of notes, probably around 20k. unfortunately the house was occupied so i left them there.
mostly found dead rats and old 'players' smoke packets

 

[grantr37]

I found a 2000 watt lamp in a loft years ago, it came from a war time floodlight I think, I still got it somewhere

they also used DC Carbon Arc lamps, some enthusiasts collect the old searchlights and actually turn them on now and then, beats any modern light hands down.....but they have to buy in the carbon rods from the 1 single company that still manufactures them in the USA via mail order as they stopped making them in the UK back in about 1951...



That lamp will be very very rare and worth a bit of money, you should offer it to either the war museum in London or Liverpool, or the Riverside Museum in Glasgow...

 

[grantr37]

I have found old cigarette packets from during WW2 and full boxes of matches from the 1920's and 1930's, the 1930's ones had "win the war, conserve fuel" on them.....unfortunately I set them aside and other people tended to throw them in the bin....
I have found glass bottles under doorsteps with cat hair and rusty nails in them, apparently this was believed to scare away witches back in the olden days...I have also found a few old coins and when ripping out an old pub years ago there was hundreds of coins and a load of banknotes under the benches/seats screwed to the walls....they were 20 and 30 years old and not usable....
I have a 100+ year old 5 foot long wooden spirit level from under a floor, in mint condition out in my shed, have only ever seen small pocket size wooden ones from the 1930's and 1940's before...I will get it out and wipe the cobwebs from it tomorrow and take a photo for here...

I used to find lager cans of the old type that went out in the 1970's which were rolled together and crimped shut with a separate top and bottom and a tear/peel back ringpull and also sometimes see 1980's fizzy pop bottles with the black plastic stand that used to be glued onto the bottom and old Glass lucozade bottles....


I have never been so luck as some people though, I used to work beside an old guy that said he was working on an old tenement in Glasgow pulling up floorboards and found a lead topped bottle of whisky from Prohibition days (when all Alcohol was banned for years) and that got sold at Auction to a Japanese collector for £90,000 which the building owner split with him....

The only bottle I ever found was when I was pulling down an old wall in a very old stable block/house and a Glass (full) bottle of Brasso metal polish from during WW2 fell out and hit me on the head....clink...behind the walls in the same place I found a wooden lead lined sink and a very very old wood burning stove, about 230 years old....the owner was straight in and smashed the lot into the skip....


My Uncle lives in a ground floor flat in a building that dates to about 1840, he was in the kitchen one night and the ceiling fell in, piles of old shoes, books and bottles fell on him along with some old coins, he got really angry and binned the lot before I could see it, chip fryer and microwave knackered by falling debris...

 

[grantr37]

On a sidenote, I know of an old farm locally, now these things might still be there.....and when I was there a long time ago working on some repairs, there was an unused Model T Ford(circa 1920), along with a 1950's car and a 1950's motorbike of types which I don't remember, just that they were ultramarine blue.....they were in a sidebarn with chickens jumping all over them, so goodness knows now, the old dear has probably passed away and the way the place was it is still probably all there with the family probably not bothering....there was also an old generator room complete with a huge Diesel Generator dating to about 1910 or thereabouts from before mains electricity was in....all brass and everything..knife switches etc.....I remember the old hand written notice on the wall about not letting old mr so and so near it when he'd been drinking etc...put up about 80 years before...


Anybody here into URBEX ?

I like looking at old things abandoned/left behind/forgotten/sealed away just as they were and think about what it was like back then...

 

[johnboy6083]

I love wandering around old buildings. We have parts of our pumping stations and treatment works down here that are abandoned and locked up. If doors are open, it's nice to wander about and have a nosy!!