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
