You know how we hid a secret note in our first house to hopefully be discovered in a few decades? Well, we found one in our new house! It doesn’t appear to be very old, so we’re guessing it’s from the previous owners (who lived here for 22 years, so it’s still pretty amazing). Where was it? Tucked behind the large wall mirror in the hall bathroom. See that tiny nub sticking out under that wonky orange arrow?
While John was giving Clara her bath I was hanging out with them slash standing-around-staring-at-things-I-can’t-wait-to-update when I looked up and saw it peeking out of the top of the mirror. So I tugged on the corner, revealing a nice little printed note.
In case you can’t make it out, it read:
May today bring you peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are both of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of us.
Isn’t that sweet? I dunno if it’s leftover pregnancy hormones or what, but it totally made me tear up. Because it’s exactly how we feel. Like we’re exactly where we’re meant to be. How cool are the past owners of our house for hiding this little gem? We think they’re the bee’s knees.
Have you guys ever found any messages in your home? Any initials with hearts scrawled in a kids closet, letters carved into concrete outside, or beer cans and old newspapers in the walls? Somebody tell me you found vintage “men’s magazines” somewhere. Scandalous.
Rose says
There are several “notes” carved in various places in our home. Unfortunately they are nothing sweet like initials or hearts.
One says “hello” and one says “you are not alone.” I can’t remember what or where the other one is, but they’re all tiny and made my stomach flip when I first saw them. They seem ghostly or perhaps made by someone struggling with depression or other mental health issues. Or maybe I’m reading too much into them.
They could be pranks from the previous owner’s annoying son, who also butchered a tree in the backyard and left plastic bb type pellets all over the entire property, inside and out.
Lolo says
Love that!!! We on the other hand did not find anything that made me tear up and be sentimental. While remodeling the bathroom of our new home we found a lovely 70’s porn video IN the wall. Seriously.
My husband thought it quite hilarious…..I on the other hand was quite happy that the kids werent in there when the wall was demo’d. Sheeesh.
Jessica B. says
Our first house was a 1920’s bungalow, and we found an awesome vintage box stashed under the eaves of the attic. It contained love letters to and from the original owner of the house (who designed and built it- he was a professor of architecture, and we live in a college town). Upon further reading, however, we discovered the letters weren’t to his wife, but to multiple mistresses who were also his students! Scandalous!!! They described in detail parts of our house, too… like what they did in front of our fireplace, on our covered porch… it made my blush just to think about it.
Our second home, which we just moved into a year ago, is a 1950s fixer upper. When we were stripping wallpaper in our dining room, we found “Jack loves Esther 1953” written in paint on the wall under the first layer of paper. Jack and Esther Hiron were the original owners of the house. Much sweeter than love notes to a mistress!
Nadia says
Ok, I am tearing up, reading about you tearing up , finding and reading that really sweet note.
Heather @ REOlisticRenovation says
How cool is that! I have never found anything like that only I love that idea. I might have to do that if we ever move.
Chelsea says
The previous owners of our home apparently forgot to pack up their attic….there was a ton of stuff up there that we were left hauling down and to the trash. It was kind of sad since most of the stuff left was old family photos, un-opened birthday cards (we totally opened them thinking they could be full of money but only came away with $5), birth certificates, a couple old love letters and even bank statements and old checks. Since these owners were not the ones that sold us the house but the ones before that we had no where to take it but the trash. I did score some cute empty picture frames though!
rebecca says
No notes for us. Just the “Elvis Toilet”. Nope. Not kidding. The toilet seat in our master bathroom was plastered with Elvis stickers and finished off with “I *heart* Elvis” on the under side of the lid. (It was a foreclosure.) Needless to say that was the first thing we changed but we took pictures and wrapped it in plastic wrap while wearing gloves. We’ll be taking it to a big white elephant gift exchange at the end of the month!
linda says
that’s so sweet! no notes found by us… but then… we’re the first owners/occupants of our home…. i’ll leave a note when/if we ever leave it, though!
Courtney says
Oh, I have such an epic story…first off, we found in our filthy home upon move-in a publication of the adult variety (with a name so vulgar it cannot be shared on this family website!) under a bunch of junk left in a built-in drawer in the half bathroom. Nice. A month or so later, my husband found a dog-earred copy of the Good News Bible in our shed…sort of weird (just location-wise) but it got REALLY weird when he opened it and found a message TO HIM inscribed in the front cover! The previous owner had left it for him, with an inspirational, personal message. To say the previous owner was a character is a vast understatement.
pattilouwho says
So, a few years ago when we did an entire bathroom overhaul, we started tearing out the 9′ vanity that stretched the length of the bathroom and behind it, taped to the wall was an envelope with photos in it. It had photos of what the bathroom looked like when the previous owners redid the bathroom (I’m assuming with all the pink tile and pink tub, that it was the original stuff – circa 1939!) But it was cool to see what the bathroom originally looked like. Nice little surprise! We left a note behind one of our vanities in the remodeled bathroom for the next generation to find. :)
Kelly says
Our basement crawl space was quite literally wallpapered in newspapers from the 1920’s. I got a huge kick out of seeing all the ads!!
http://9-oh-6.blogspot.com/2009/10/clearing-out-graveyard.html
harmony says
This probably seems totally random, but the picture of your bathroom made me think of a question: we don’t have any electricty in the wall above our bathroom sink/mirror and really want to put a sconce above or to the side of the mirror. I tried searching for “plug-in” sconces, but none of the ones I found worked in a bathroom. Do you guys have any ideas?! Thanks!!
YoungHouseLove says
Hey Harmony,
It’s only around $50-100 to have an outlet or fixture box added by a licensed electrician (in our experience) so you could get someone to create a fixture box to hardwire your sconce for you at that fee. Hope it helps!
xo,
s
heather says
no notes at our house but…my parents live on a farm and a couple of years ago they found a report card from the previous owners kid…with a whole lotta bad marks…haha..i guess the kid had stashed it in the barn in hopes that his parents would never find it..and i guess they didn’t…haha!
Lindsay says
What a cool find! That’s awesome. We didn’t find any notes…but we did find leftover prescription medication that is…questionable. We’ve never had anyone crazy stop by our house to ask for their pills, so we tossed them. Better safe than sorry.
Tracy says
We renovated our kitchen last year and found an old newspaper from 1977 – the day after President Carter’s inauguration.
http://atlpost.blogspot.com/2010/03/kitchen-update.html
We decided to hide the old newspaper as well as a current newspaper behind the cabinets for whoever decides to redo the kitchen in the future.
http://atlpost.blogspot.com/2010/03/take-guessanother-kitchen-update.html
DJ says
We have lived in out house for more than 8 years. We never met the previous owners; they’d already moved across the country before the house sold. A few months ago, we were cleaning our junk out of the attic so we could have a yard sale. We found an ancient carseat- it had to be from 1985! The house was less than 2 years old and barely lived in when we moved in, and we didn’t even know the other owners had kids.
Diana says
In my dormitory suite the heat went out one cold and blustery January day. The RA called up the maintenance man who pulled a SWORD out of our heating unit. We then duct taped it to the ciderblock walls above the television as a sort of makeshift-mantle-decoration.
Rebecca says
That’s so sweet! We haven’t found any notes in our house, but we did find a receipt for a lady’s ahem…pleasuring device…in the back of a dresser drawer. Not too big of a deal, except the dresser was from my mother-in-law and her name was on the receipt. Awkward and hysterical–kinda like Modern Family on Wednesday night!
lindsey says
We did!! My husband was installing a water line and had to remove some of the drop ceiling in our basement. And what did he find but a stack of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit editions from the 80’s! Balancing on the cross bars in the drop ceiling… Hilarious!!
Tanya says
All we found was a note from the old owners telling us how sorry they were they didn’t get to clean out the garbage filled garage and basement. I teared up, but for a different reason.
~Tanya
dans-le-townhouse.blogspot.com
wynter says
I have never found one in the house we are currently living in. It would be amazing if we did, or some kind of trinket. This house is one of the first houses built in this town and is over 100 yrs old. (http://www.levantown.org/sitebuilder/images/brickhome.jpg)
I wanted to leave something in the house that we are building. But it is almost complete and I don’t have a clue on what to leave/write. all we have left is a few touch ups and some trim work. I guess I missed the boat. =/
Betty Kimmel says
We moved into our new home back in Oct, the previous owners left a clock above the fridge so I decided to get rid of it so as I was taking it off the wall something fell off.. and there it was a “free VIP pass” for a striptease and gentlemen club signed by “Juicy” saying: I can’t wait to see you again :D
kelly ann says
My parents found a DIAMOND RING under the floor boards in their house. They tried to contact a few previous owners of the house, but none knew anything about it. The jeweler they took it to estimated it was from the 30s. What was crazy was that same day, my grandmother lost her ring. So, she now wears this GORGEOUS gem.
What a find, eh?
Kyleen says
When we moved into our house a few years ago we found a large, life-sized cut out of “The Rock” (Dewayne Johnson) in our attic and that was all….weird, huh?! We took a nice picture of him next to my husband before cutting him up and sticking him in the recycling bin.
Alicia says
I love this…going to print it out and post it at my desk…
Kellie C says
We found the weirdest, most unexpected thing I would ever think to find in our house when we moved last April. We were cleaning out the laundry room cabinets (which are pretty high up) and on the tallest shelf there was a large manilla envelope with someone’s brain scan xrays in it! Even stranger is that they were from 1983 and our house was built in 1989…we joked about hanging them up as art work:)
Gepke from the Netherlands says
Isn’t that just a loverly message. I haven’t found treasure in the houses I lived in. But when I was still living with at home with my mother, we once got an old piano that had always belonged to my aunt an uncle. One day I was sitting behind the piano an found a little note tucked away in a corner. I turned out that my nice who was about 10 at the time, had written a goodbye note to the piano. I don’t recall exactly what it said. But it was something along the lines of; “I love you sweet piano. I have always played you with a lot of joy. I am going to mis your very much.” How sweet is that!
Melissa says
Found the old owners SEX tape, of themselves… where did it take place? My living room.
nancie says
oh WOW!!! that note is awesome!!
it gave me chills!!
doesn’t that make you just feel SO good…you just know that this is definately where you are supposed to be…
it’s like they were writing that message straight to you…
i hope they know how lucky they are – to have someone living in their home that loves it as much as they did..
hope they are readers of yhl..
such a comfort to you – and to them!!
Mary G says
We didn’t find dirty magazines at our house but when the ceiling tiles were being replaced at work last we the workers found some x-rated mags in the ceiling of the men’s bathroom. My male co-workers said there were about 20 and were from the early 90’s. One of them even had something to do with Molly Ringwald! Too funny!v
Not The Blandings says
Love that! When we recently gutted our bathroom, we found 2 windows hidden in the wall. What made that find even more exciting was that the previous family thought to write on those windows before drywalling them in. So we found their timecapusle from the 1930’s to the 1970’s (pics on my blog). Thats the best part of renovating – you never know what you’ll find :)
Nikki
Amber says
That is awesome. I love hearing stories like these.
Kristen says
Yes! In a bedroom formerly belonging to a teenager in the 90’s, I found a “Congratulations on accepting Jesus” card along with three condoms. Hilarious!
Shevy says
my mom is getting ready to move and she went through my brother’s bedroom and found $100 hidden in a hole in the wall.
Becky says
We found divorce papers, bank statements and pictures of a couple with the woman’s face cut out. There was also a Christmas tree in the attic, dishes in the dishwasher and stuff in the fridge. (Foreclosure, so the milk was at least a year expired).
The other house we’ve bought we found a sai and a sword.
The next door neighbor wins though: she found grenades in her house. They were somehow part of her foundation in her basement and the bomb squad had to come remove them! (They were hidden under a fridge when she bought the place)
Amy says
We found a cassette tape of a psychic reading with the previous owner’s name on it, but it seemed like such a private thing that we’ve never listened to it (not that we could do so very easily since we don’t have a tape deck anymore).
We also found a Sears portrait-style picture that had been ripped in two, and the half we found was her as a young woman. We are always on the lookout for the mysterious other half of the picture…
Dani says
Friends of ours actually found old prophylactics – seriously – like, from the 40s – in their basement.
Karri says
I haven’t found anything in my own house (besides some long buried army men and Hot Wheels) but my grandparents lived in an old farmhouse that my great great great grandfather had built. It had all of these fabulous built ins, including a floor to ceiling dining room hutch. The hutch had two drawers in the bottom of it and on the bottom of the drawer was written:
“To Lizzie on her wedding day – We’ll always remember sleeping standing up in corners trying to get her house done.”
Lizzie was my great great great grandma, and the note was written by the folks who built the house. (In case that wasn’t obvious.) It appears that builders were rushed to meet deadlines a hundred years ago as well.
Allison says
When we were replacing our porch ceiling, we found empty beer bottles stuck in the rafters. We also found a German coin from World War 2 under a heating vent cover when we were refinishing the floors. Our neighbor’s grandparents built our house in 1919 and has known every occupant that’s ever lived here. She said the bottles are from the 70s when the porch was enclosed and the coin found it’s way from Germany in the pocket of a soldier.
nancie says
my mom always let me write and draw on the walls before we put wallpaper up…i’d do fun artwork and graffiti, then she’d make me write different facts about what year it was..and about current events that were going on at that particular time….
i suppose that’d be fun for someone one day.
it’d probably be more fun for me to see…!! kinda wish i could now that i think about it!! that had to have been 30+ years ago!!
Emily says
The old owners of our house just left us excessively hideous wallpaper. My brother, however, found a creepy container with holy water vials in his attic when he moved in. The holy water was all dried out but he figured it was a last rites kit (or maybe for an exorcism!).
Lindsay says
In one of the houses we lived in my sister’s new room had a cut out in the ceiling to go up into the attic crawl space. When we checked it out one day there was a bag full of empty beer cans stashed up there. :)
Alisa D. says
Love that! Very thoughtful…it really is the little things!
Tiffany says
We found a bunch of stuff in the suspended ceiling we recently removed from our basement. First, we found some old love letters and a journal from the 70’s from the previous owner. He kept talking about his lost lover (and it was NOT the women who he owned our house with for the past 35 years)! How’s that for scandalous?
We also found a wooden trinkets box with some old coins and $2 bills. I was really excited when I saw the cash, thinking maybe I had found the motherload, but it was around $7 total.
Finally, we found some beer cans and a hooka pipe.
Oh, and we also found 2 (complete) mouse skeletons in the wall (I have some pics in a blog post back in Oct – they are pretty creepy).
All in all these finds made for a lot of excitement during the demolition of our basement!!
Sara says
Never found anything myself but when I was 15 I carved my sister and I’s names into the big wooden stairs in our closet that lead up to the attic. I would like to think someone thought that was cool :)
Beth H. says
I wish we found a cool note, or even names carved somewhere. Or a childrens height chart! Unfortunately we were left with hydroponic nitrogen balls everywhere.. seeing as the previous owner grew and sold medical marijuana. Yay! haha it was horrifying at first (the smell and stains and dried leaves everywhere) but now that its cleaned up its a funny story.
Mandy says
We were able to paint in the house we are in now before the floors were done, so we painted on the floors and wrote our names on them, so if the floors ever get redone by another owner, they will see it :)
Bethany says
The people that lived in my parents house before us were homeschooled, and we found school books and homework assignments stuffed in the drop ceiling in the basement, as if they thought by hiding those things the kids thought they wouldn’t have to read or do homework!
Ali says
Okay, I have a good one for you guys. Moved into my first home. Then boyfriend (now hubby) starts looking in the cabinets on move in day to “see if they left anything”. I told him I had already looked, they were clean and empty. Well, being that he’s 6’6″ to my 5’2″, he could see in the very back of the highest cabinet, a white ceramic gravy boat. I called the owners and asked them if they had left one behind, the lady told me they didn’t have one! Alrighty…so then I relayed the story to my father, who told me that he and my mom, just married, no $$, moved into their first apt and couldn’t figure out the weird smell in the kitchen. They looked all around to no avail. Got up high and discovered a (dirty) gravy boat in the back of a tall kitchen cabinet – yuck, I know, but cool, because, sadly, my mom died of cancer a few years before I moved and I think it was her funny way of welcoming me to my first place. That boat has a place of honor in my kitchen – always!
Jess says
My fiance (now husband) and I lived in my grandfather’s house for a while after he was moved to a nursing home. In the process of cleaning everything out, we found my grandparents’ original wedding invitation, wedding program and love letters they sent to each other. A Valentine’s Day card entitled “To My Darling Husband” is the one find that really choked me up. Their love story spanned 50 years and is something my husband and I both look to as we start our life together.