What’s the strangest or most expensive item you’ve found or left in a property?

daivid

Oddest (almost…) - old shopping bag under the rockery. Luckily it was just the previous owner's bodge to protect the electrics for a water feature. 

Most valuable - arguably the spare tiles for the bathroom which allowed me to replace the few I needed to when reconfiguring rather than trying to hunt down a match or retile the whole room. 

Bonniepurple

Our first house was a repo, so we had all sorts.   Racist and sexist graffiti on the walls, the most repeatable was “we conceived our daughter here. Hope you do the same” with graphic accounts of how.  There were car tyres in a filled in pond.  Car radios in the garage.  A full of oil industrial fryer balanced in a cupboard.  Loads of letters from bailiffs.

lookstraightahead

chickens. People leaving their chickens 🙄🤷‍♀️

knightstyle

I found an old victorian? bussle in a loft some years ago.   Plus when we lived in France a neighbour removed a downstairs toilet and found stairs leading to a previously hidden cellar and in it were lots of bottles of wine but they had all gone off, plus a big pile of coal and an old hot water boiler.  He gave us the coal and it took several trailer loads all loaded by hand using buckets up those stairs. Lasted us two years in our stove.

strawb_shortcake

One flat we moved in had some suspect white powder and needles in the attic.

Same flat when we were moving, we'd had enough and decided to put the king-size mattress in the attic just to get it out the way. It wasn't that easy to fit through the hatch, and did get wedged. My Dad turned up and actually walked past the mattress hanging out the hatch and didn't even notice it. 

We were young, and thought it was funny someone else finding it. Looking back now imagine my paint scheme would have been the bigger problem 🙂

It was also a council flat in a less than desirable place, I'm pretty sure what we found and left was quite tame

uralmaid

We moved into our house 2 years ago.  There was a delapidated static caravan in the garden.  The roof had caved in and also part of the floor.  When we finally got round to dismantling it there were 3 large sacks of toys (all stuff which would have been expensive).  On going through them with a view to sending them to the charity shop they were all missing parts so had to go in the skip as we didn't want children being upset if things were missing. There was a cabinet and in the cabinet were at least 600 home made cassette tapes.  There was also lots of black plastic sheeting and a lot of lamps (can only guess what they were for).  Also throughout the garden we found enough vodka bottles to keep a bottling plant in stock for a year. Even now whenever we are doing work in the garden which involves deeper digging, we find the odd vodka bottle.  

LandM1

A glass walking stick in the loft. It’s beautiful, 

Skiddaw1

LandM1 said:

A glass walking stick in the loft. It’s beautiful, 

Gosh, I wonder who owned it? It's like something from a fairy story. I have visions of an ageing Cinderella replacing her glass slippers with a glass walking stick when she started having difficulties in managing the stairs.

coffeeplease

In the walls, when replacing old plaster and horsehair with fiberglass insulation, I found a cage crinoline undergarment (hoop for a skirt), and a pair of very thin black leather lace up shoes for a woman that were small enough for a child. These were from the later Victorian era about 1870s. 
In another house, in a void under a stair, I found a letter, handwritten in pencil on a piece of simple lined paper, from a girl named Astrid. She wrote to her parents begging them to let her come home, promising she would be good, and telling them she loved them very much. I don't think I'll ever forget that.  

Skiddaw1

coffeeplease said:

In another house, in a void under a stair, I found a letter, handwritten in pencil on a piece of simple lined paper, from a girl named Astrid. She wrote to her parents begging them to let her come home, promising she would be good, and telling them she loved them very much. I don't think I'll ever forget that.  

That's awful! No wonder you've never forgotten it. I wonder what the back story was? It's like a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel.