(no subject)

[telophase]

A post by inkstone reminds me: so far in the house as we're unpacking we've found a sample vial of Prada men's cologne, and a stripper's business card.

ETA: so what things have YOU found in a place you moved into?

ETA2: Also, also - thinking about inkstone's post more: have you ever encountered the superstition of putting pennies in closets/windowsills/corners for blessing/luck? If so, do you know the ethnic background and religion of the person who did it? So far it seems to be a cross-cultural Catholic thing.

Comments

[xebra42.livejournal.com]

The previous owner of our home left us all of his booze, and it's all top shelf stuff! Too bad I'm really the only one in the house that drinks, and I'm mostly a wine/beer girl :)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Now that would be useful! XD

[marith.livejournal.com]

The house I grew up in had some excellent relics of the original owners: a penny embedded in the floor of the garage, and several dog pawprints and kids' names in the concrete floor of a closet under the stairs.

[solarbird]

so what things have YOU found in a place you moved into?
Oh gods this is far, far, far too long a list. But the best things are probably the newspapers from the 1930s with articles on the "dynamic young leadership" in Germany (along with various other interesting old newspaper bits), a huge stash of sewing supplies (which I've been using!), and the late 1940s/early 1950s small billboard advertising the holiday chocolates made at the house when it had also been a chocolatier's home production kitchen in that era. (It got shut down in '58, being cited for "too many kitchens." 11 of them. You should see the natural gas plumbing. It's insane.)

Oh, also some nice Depression-era furniture, and a 1920s telephone stand. I'm still using the dresser table we found. Not as much coolness value, really, but still.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Cool!

We've got a newspaper page from the 1960s shellacked onto the garage wall. I've forgotten what it's about other than it's got a photo of two women on it, as myrialux parks his car in front of it and I can't see it easily. :)

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

A couple years ago, we found a kinda real lookin' rusted out gun buried in the backyard. But we knew the previous owners were like that, already.

Our house had toggle switches all over in weird places---by the bedroom door in the woodwork, in the kitchen under a shelf, e.g. It turns out the previous owners had Problem Children and had constructed an Insane Eastern European Home Alarm System with the neighbors to one side, in which they ran wires through the walls and cellar and installed these slightly-hidden toggle switches all over the place as panic buttons.

Our contractors who were painting and stuff kept finding them and fiddling with them and apparently they were all still connected and were setting off some kind of alarm in the house next door, but they didn't actually explain it to us for a while...perhaps because they were embarrassed.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Current place included random name brand cleaning supplies - laundry detergent, kleenex, paper towels and lots of glass cleaner. Also, they forgot to get the random brick a brack out of the second toilet, so we had lots of fake flowers and birds.

Two houses ago I found a nice sweater, which I still wear. No pennies though.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Unless there's something up in the attic left by the flippers who did my current house, the most exciting thing was *drumrollllll* a partially used can of paint in my apartment.

I did get a knife that got left behind in my dorm back in college, and a straw sombrero from somebody's trip to Mexico.

[spikeiowa.livejournal.com]

...have you ever encountered the superstition of putting pennies...

Yes. We rented a house in Hayward 15 years ago. It had pennies in many places. The California wisdom on that was... gypsies. It was the only time I've encountered such -- although most of my life I lived in smallish towns in the midwest.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. I've never encountered it.

[rachel-renee.livejournal.com]

We just moved into our new house this summer and we found two water pistols and a case of 45 shells that is missing 3.

Trover

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

My parents' house-- Liddell and Scott, A Shorter Greek-English Lexicon; very useful when I began studying ancient Greek. (Also a buncha kids' books in Dutch. Previous owners were Dutch Jews who fled the country ahead of Hitler.)

My house-- a pair of knee-high bright blue stockings; worn by me until they developed holes.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

A high-quality Gerber steel knife in the closet of my first apartment.

[awamiba.livejournal.com]

In our first house, the previous owners left behind a few boxes of various small tools & screws, nuts, etc. In our current house, the previous owners left in the backyard: a big wheel toy, a cozy coupe, two scooters, & one broken kids bike. In the attic, they left: a small swimming pool, a box of miscellaneous trash, some broken blinds, and a stack of magazines no one wanted me to see in my delicate pregnant state (really, I have no idea what they were).