[lt230s]

Just some beef cow patties, and some old bottles, etc. in dump site near back fence line and a lot of rocks. 3 acres was a pasture that at one time had a house, hand dug well. Well was still there but house was long gone. Checked the well but nothing of value at the bottom.

 

[baltimoreed]

Bontai, My local tire guy and I go way back, no charge to dispose of them. I do add any found steel, brass and copper to my junk yard $ recycles. This was when it was in wheat and the well head installed.
.

 

[mrbeef]

Neither of our houses have had much in the way of left over stuff. I can’t think of anything that was outside the contract.

However, in my formative years I was partly responsible for cleaning up houses my father purchased out of foreclosure and some of his rental units. The top three:
1) foreclosure clean up (I didn’t handle this one). Former owners got into cocaine and became paranoid and quit throwing their garbage away and started filling bedrooms. Two roll off dumpster full.
2) Abandoned car, took the better part of 5 years to foreclose and the guy left a mess and a Ford Escort sitting in the driveway. That was a pain to legally dispose of.
3) Change city! One of the last clean ups I did before college was a rental. I’d score the mess 7.5/10 (broken toys, newspapers, food in the fridge, and the other normal suspects). I started finding change while I was cleaning, a pile here, a pile there, a couple scattered quarters here. In the end I pocketed over $75 in change. For a 17 year old making $6/hr in 2001 and driving a truck, that was fuel money for over two weeks!
Honorable Mention: the family that left the water bed frame but took the mattress and head board yet took the deck boards off the deck of the above ground pool. Your guess is as good as mine! They did leave some nice old school beer steins in a box in the attic. I still have a couple over 20 years later.

 

[JoeZeppy]

Bought the house in 1993 - 3 items come to mind:

• A fairly well-built workbench in the cellar - I still use it regularly.
• A rickety, metal-framed picnic table - I disassembled it shortly after we moved in and about 5 years ago finally took the metal frame to the recycle center realizing that I'd never rebuild it. I do still have a couple of the 2x10's though and use them on occasion.
• An old wheelbarrow like the one in the pic below - too shallow to be good for much (I remember using one as a kid) but it's still in my cellar and used as a catch-all, LOL.
• 
  

 

[MARK (LI)]

It didn't happen to me ...but here on Long Island some guy found a 55 gallon drum in the basement of a house he had bought...inside they found a dead woman

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/13/nyregion/suicide-adds-to-mystery-of-corpse-found-in-barrel.html

 

[steddy]

Not so much a home or property, but back in the day I worked at an RV dealership. One of my early duties was cleaning out trade ins. It was like a scavenger hunt all the time.
Lots of change
A radio/CD player (low quality/cheap, antenna broken but still worked)
18” 3/8 drive snap on extension (still have it after 25 years )
Axe - still have that, too
A complete (several mismatched also) silverware - still using that in wife’s camper and around the house from time to time)
3’ long Taiwan screwdriver - still one of my favorite pry bars
Lots of camping supplies (TP, toilet chemicals, portable jack stands, camping mats, etc) that we’d often just leave in there for the next owners
That’s the good ones that come to mind right off hand.

 

[TnTkr]

When we bought our house, we agreed with previous owners about bunch of things, that are useful when living in the house, but which they didn't want to take with them, when moving to an apartment. Some more expencive things, like the tractor, log splitter and lawn mower we bought separately at very, very reasonable price.

Additionally we have found lots of old agricultural equipment and remainings of them from the terrain and even in the ground. Both tractor attached and horse pulled. Many of them I hardly know the finnish name, not to mention an english one.😅 We've planned to build a platform and roof for best of those to prevent further rot and rust, and to have nice little exhibition on our yard. Maybe in next ten years...

And being an old property, there was lots of trash around the area from those times when everything was simply buried in a pit before there became the law of the mandatory regular trash collection in 80's.

 

[Steamguy]

Just a few to add to the mix, here:

After my mom passed, my dad bought a house on the same block where we used to live. I grew up with the guy who sold it to him (I can't say the words to describe him on a family forum, but he was a moron who had it in for me for some reason). I think just to get back at me, he left about a dozen half-gallon cartons of dog poop tucked into the walls of that old garage. It was one of those with the horizontal boards about every two feet apart, going up the walls. This was about 35 years ago, when that kind of thing was mostly unthinkable - people in general were nicer to each other then.

At our second house, we had a real problem with mosquitoes. We'd figured it was because the place was in the woods. One spring, I decided to clean up a bit around the little winter creek that ran across the corner and the side of the property. Found seven old tires down there, took them into the big city to the south to be "recycled", and that magically solved our mosquito problem.

Neighbor house were we (well, now it's just I) am now, the last renters that were in before this set had something in for me (Again? What do I do to these people? Mind my own business and that's what ticks them off?). But they really did a number on the place. The guy had this "excavation" business, and I'd hear machinery over there running all hours of the night. Found out after they'd moved out that the guy had buried huge chunks of concrete in the gardens (2 acres of good gardens) and had stolen at least 20 yards of topsoil from the back hill of the property.

Not only that, but by carelessly operating the excavator inside the barn, they'd screwed up several of the beams and a couple of the posts. The owner was livid, once he came back to inspect after they moved out. I knew the guy, he was a nice guy, but needed to move and still owed plenty on the property, so had decided to rent it out. Heckuva way to behave; what's wrong with people nowadays...?
Maybe it's because they didn't have any 'sweat equity' in the place.

 

[609745]

one of the flipper homes we did, the Po left packages of venison neatly hidden on the tops of heat duct's, first time we fired up the heat OMG, we had to get hazmat suits with air bottles to go in the basement to find where the stink was coming from.

 

[no2498]

a renter left a metal detector back in 1982. it still works

john

 

[UncleMerle]

What have you "received" when buying a house (or moving into an old apartment) by the previous owner (or tenant)?

Useful or other???

Here are some of my examples (started this discussion in a different thread):





EDIT: Just remembered, the PO of this house also left a pick mattock behind.

View attachment 2582125

Mike

An old Irish Setter left alone in the basement, too lame to get up the stairs by herself. I had to carry her up. Called the po and they did not come back for her until the next day.

 

[S854]

4 - empty 55 gallon barrels (held tractor fluid at one point), garden wheelbarrow that buckled first time it was used, couple well-used shovels, 5 - 4X8 sheets of OSB (laying out in the weather, crumbled when I tried to pick up a corner), useful posts/beams/boards neatly stacked in the barn, 300’ of chain link top rail, 40 or so cinder blocks, 100’ 1” black pipe… so… half good/half bad…

…oh… and an $83 overuse charge from the local transfer station which, in Helena, MT, is attached to the property, not the person who over abused their annual dump allotment…

 

[Gerrard]

What have you "received" when buying a house (or moving into an old apartment) by the previous owner (or tenant)?

Useful or other???

Here are some of my examples (started this discussion in a different thread):





EDIT: Just remembered, the PO of this house also left a pick mattock behind.

View attachment 2582125

Mike

I live in a college town and the geniuses going home just open up their door and tell their pets " see ya later" and a cpl cats show up on my porch and I gotta feed n water them and put a box with a towel in them to stay warm, and I was telling this landlord who owns a bunch of cut-up in 2 or 3 apartment houses and he said " you should see the places that they don't let them out " . And I said please don't tell me any more". I don't go for animal abuse or neglect, just ask my son who thank God shoved me almost down yrs ago when I actually took a shot at this guy who tied his dog to a tree and was gonna shoot it because it wouldn't tree a racoon and needless to say when that 8mm Mauser hit about 18" above his head into said tree he cleared out and lift the **** dog there, we gave it to my brother in law and she lived a good long life. And this a true story and I don't care who knows it or likes it. Anyone that would harm an innocent animal that's not attacking you or something like that I wouldn't trust them around a child or baby. Its just how I feel about that sort of thing.

 

[rwall10597]

When I bought my house there was nice Honda GX140 from the mid 80s with a pressure washer on it. It was locked up. I worked it loose, and got it cleaned up. It ended up being an excellent machine that starts on the first pull for a decade, it spun the 24” rotating brush like a champ. Unfortunately I loaned it to a friend that must have run it dry and the pump burned up. I’ve still got the GX140 waiting for a project. It hasn’t been used in years, but every once in a while I put a little gas in it and one pull and she stillbstarts right up on the first pull. That said, if anybody has a use for it I’m ready to pass it on, it’s located in 30040, send me a message.

 

[beenthere2]

My father sold his retirement home in northern Arkansas and moved my mother to Iowa when she was having health problems. After 3-4 years, he remembered an Indian head penny collection stuffed above the stairs to the lower level between the floor joists. He'd forgotten that he did some paneling and enclosed that area. Then with the urgency of selling and moving Mom, it was completely forgotten.
This was a large collection started back in the late 1800's by Dad's Uncle Will who owned and operated a General Merchandise store for 40-50 years in a small Iowa town. He collected the Indian head pennies and just kept them in jars and tin containers. As a teen ager in the 50's, brothers and I would fill collector books with the different dates of pennies. We had several books filled (all slots full) and 2-3 gallons of the pennies waiting to be sorted over again.
Often wondered if the new owners ever found this collection. Likely only be if they were into a remodeling project to discover them.

 

[jrm351986]

When we bought our home only things left behind was some lumber, PVC piping and old auto ramps in basement. And a JD oil filter brand new, but no tractor.

 

[wdh0918]

When we bought our farm it came with an old barn. While I was busy mowing down acres of briars, my wife and daughters were left to clean out the barn. They found an artificial leg and several 5 gallon buckets of lard. What a mess!

 

[Ariens93GT20]

Lard makes a good tire sealer when installing them or guess should have said tallow..
Could have even started brush fires with it.

But the wooden leg? Two or three more. Just maybe a table or a work bench.

All some people see is trash.

 

[steddy]

That wooden leg could have made a pretty sweet lamp also.

 

[Ariens93GT20]

Could make one big door knocker also.

I repurpose when possible. I picked up a bed rail on a clean out last week and had intended on picking up both. It was gone this week.

Thing happen when you get distracted.

There are times I wish I had not left the cast iron grill grates, the slab on marble and work benches behind.