11 Weirdest Things People Have Found During Home Renovations
Photos: Tony Anderrson/Getty Images/Tracy Culleton/Simply Southern Cottage/Stephanie Sharp. Illustrations: Shani Kravetz.
Pulling up floorboards and scraping through old wallpaper is like the interior design world’s equivalent of an archaeological dig. Each decorative strata unveils clues about the past, be it decor trends or lifestyle necessities from long ago. Botanical wallpaper and shag carpeting is one thing—but sometimes the discoveries get truly strange. Sarah Jefferys of Sarah Jefferys Architecture + Interiors in New York City says “renovating homes in New York City is always full of surprises. In one particularly memorable project, we found a bullet lodged in a rafter while gut-renovating a former mafia member’s residence.”
In the spirit of surprising finds, here are 10 of the most fascinating and weirdest things people have found during home renovations.
A century-old butter churn
Tracy Culleton (@homeintheblooms) and her husband, Mark, made a slew of discoveries while renovating his grandparents’ 1904 farmhouse at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland. They uncovered lanterns, a full Guinness bottle from the 1960s, a vintage Nippon camera, coins, medals, and horseshoes. But a favorite find was an antique butter churn dating back to the 1930s. “We found it when digging the foundations where the old parlor used to be,” Culleton says. “My dad restored it, and it’s now a feature outside our home as a nod to Mark’s grandparent’s and the work they did on the farm.”
A scandalous diary
Sara McDaniel of Simply Southern Cottage has renovated almost an entire city block in Minden, Louisiana, so she’s made her share of unusual discoveries. But she says one of the most intriguing was an old diary hidden in the floor of her own home. “Floor joists were being pulled from the attic space for new electrical and ductwork,” she says. “That’s when we found the pages titled Autobiography of Belle Howard Mayfield, dating back to the 1800s.” Within the weathered pages, Mayfield detailed an illicit affair with her teacher and her attempts to get her mother to let her drop out of school at age 16—eventually she did. The find inspired McDaniel to try to find more info about the home’s former residents and why the teen had to hide her secrets in the attic.
A pizza party in the walls
“When renovating our office building—dating back to the late 1800s—we found old soda cans from the ’80s that were stashed behind the drywall,” says Lindsey Jamison of Rumor Designs in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. “We also found old pizza boxes from when our building was an Italian restaurant in the 1970s.”
Antique school supplies
Stephanie and Adam Sharp of Old Souls, a historic renovation company, purchased a former two-room elementary school in 2022. And though the 1920s school had already been renovated once in the ’80s and converted into three apartments, they still found remnants of its building’s academic days when they got down to business. When their electrician searched for places to run new wiring, he stumbled upon a hidden cavity beneath the central staircase. “Hidden for decades, we found an old birdhouse, school desks, and wooden dowels that would have held educational posters and maps,” Stephanie Sharp says. “The birdhouse was especially meaningful, because we have photos from the 1920s of students with birdhouses they’d made.”
A breast implant
“While renovating a bedroom, I came across a very unique thing that gave me pause,” says Tracy Metro of Tracy Metro Designs. The project was for a design show Metro hosted in which she decorated the bedrooms of adult kids still living with their parents. In this particular case, she was clearing out the area beneath an adult woman’s baby pink twin bed. “I had removed old cassette tapes and boy band memorabilia,” Metro says. “Then, I removed what looked like a milky white flattened water balloon. Seemed innocent enough until after descaling the mounds of dust bunnies from the ‘balloon.’ I was able to decipher that I was in fact holding a breast implant!” To this day, Metro isn’t quite sure what it was doing there or why there was only one, but she does say, “It’s one of my favorite mammaries from hosting that show.”
A personal speakeasy
These days homeowners like to flaunt their liquor collections with lavish home bars featuring wood paneling and counters made of quartzite. But back in the 1920s, bar design needed to be much more lowkey, as the team at Lamont Bros. Design & Construction in Portland, Oregon, discovered. Joseph Patrick, the company’s co-owner, says, “We found an amazing Prohibition-era hidden liquor cabinet behind a refrigerator. You’d pull a string and a panel slid up to reveal a hidden storage area. The house was built right around the 1920s when Prohibition was in effect, which was a pretty big deal here in Portland.”
A car grille
Stumbling spare car parts in a garage would make sense, but finding them concealed within an indoor staircase is another story. That’s exactly what happened to Philip Thomas Vanderford of Studio Thomas James, who found a grille and a few engine parts from a late 1980s Lincoln Town car. “We preserved the grille; it hangs in our guest closet and it’s a fun conversation piece,” Vanderford says. “I only wish my original garage was big enough for a town car.”
A concealed fireplace
“One of the most striking discoveries I’ve made during a home restoration was uncovering an enormous stone fireplace hidden behind the walls,” says real estate developer Jose Berlanga, author of The Business of Home Building. While Berlanga doesn’t have a picture of the fireplace when intact, he did share a photo of the incredible amount of brick and stone that kept pouring out during removal of the old fireplace. “The sturdiness and old style of construction was impressive back then, and the amount of material used is what truly shocked us the most,” he says. “It took days and several people to perform the work.”
A swimming pool
Uneven flooring could mean water damage, foundational issues, or—for the Lamont Bros, at least—a secret swimming pool. While replacing flooring during an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) renovation, they noticed oddities and lumps in the concrete below. “We actually pulled up old plans and found that they permitted a pool in there,” Patrick says. “At some point they wanted to remove it, so they just hired somebody to pour concrete. They didn’t permit it or anything. So we had to level the floor to fix the previous poorly done removal of the pool.”
A mystery dungeon
Discovering an extra room isn’t as dreamy as it sounds—especially when it’s more about uncovering clandestine quarters than scoring additional square footage. When Joe Meringolo of JSM Project Management worked on a pool renovation in Los Angeles, his team stumbled upon something unexpected as they started the demo—a hidden concrete room attached to the pool. Inside, there was a tripod set up with a camera, its lens pointing directly into what used to be the pool. There was no obvious way into the room from the house and no clues as to why it was there.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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