Some blackberry jam (homemade) in the VERY back of a deep cabinet...I don't even want to know how long it's been there...maybe mid to late 90's??

Gross huh?

Some serving platters my grandmother had given me (she past away in Feb last year) so quite a cherished item that I forgot she had given me many years ago!

A birthday card my boyfriend's dad had given his mother that was quite funny...said something about a cute booty! (We are remodeling the kitchen in our house we inherited from them when they bought a new one)

About 15 flower vases stuck in the back of the cabinet under the sink. I guess we just always kept buying new ones!

So not quite the same kind of treasures but fun!

The coolest thing we found was UNDER the cabinets after it had been gutted...a McGovern-Shriver bumper sticker never used. :)

When I was gutting the downstairs of our old raised ranch, I found a machete. It had a serial number on it so I did a trace. It was a WWII Marine issue, South Pacific.

The first owner of the house was an ex-Marine from WWII.

I still have it and keep it in excellent working order and sharp! It's great for cutting watermelons!!!!

Enjoy the journey.
eal51 in western CT

I found the most interesting things during the demolition phase of my remodel. Take a look at some of the ugliest linolium you will ever see! I also found some empty bottles of Bud inside the kitchen walls, a very old screwdriver and lots of charcoal inside the walls left over from a house fire in 1984!
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when we removed the chimney in our kitchen, there were about 8 feet of birds nest material inside of it.. basically from the kitchen floor to the ceiling was packed with it.

looking forward to what else we uncover-- demo starts in a few weeks.

We have a 161 year old house and you would think we would be finding stuff left and right...nope!
The coolest thing we found was a penny in the floorboards dated 1860 and an un-circulated penny placed on a beam when we removed some "knotty pine" to put in a slider. Dated 1953 which told me that was the year they redid the kitchen (boomerang counter tops and knotty pine walls are still here!)

We have done just about every room in this house and every room, I document, take pictures, seal it all up and place somewhere for someone to find it in the net 100 years. I wish someone did that for us!
I'm excited to take the cabinets down to see if we will find anything.

When we gutted out our downstairs bathroom, my son was tearing out the shower tile and in the wall he found a Dunken Donut bag with a half eaten donut inside. It was like a petrified donut. I guess the person who built the bathroom did not like that flavor donut. It was there since 1965 when the house was built. Also, there was a Dunken Donut store about a block away at that time. That was a strange find.

Doing some cabinet demo last week we found a report card from 1957, and a scrap of paper with a list of bank balances and life insurance policy amounts written on them, as if someone were dying ... very touching. We researched all the previous owners of our home in the local Polk Directory and we feel like we know them!

jdayo,

I'm not saying I disagree with your assessment of the flooring you found but....

I proudly picked out the identical flooring that is resting on the side of the cabinet for my first house that we built in 1984. LOVED IT!!! (for about 5 years and then it yellowed and peeled and ...)

I think that's the hardest part about picking out stuff for this kitchen redo. I'm thinking of spending a boat-load of money. What of the stuff I'm picking out now is the equivalent of that old vinyl?????

I just get paralyzed sometimes envisioning someone coming into my house in 2020 and saying "What in the heck was this person THINKING????" - even worse when I'm the one walking into my kitchen saying "What chemicals were you into in 2009?"!

Jdayo, I grew up with very similar green vinyl flooring. I think it's part of why it was so easy for the contractor to convince me I wanted tile floors for my new kitchen. ;-)

We found a silver revolver sitting on a beam in the basement of our house in Seattle when remodeling. It was actually quite pretty but with three little boys who each had about six hands we got rid of it in a hurry.

When removing the 70's redone butcher-block laminate countertops from my mid-century modern home, I discovered original robins-egg blue laminate that had been hastily glued over... and white/gold terazzo flooring that had been covered with the worn -out Mexican pavers probably at the same time. My remodel is being done with more current neutral finishes, but I really appreciated how lovely those would have been, and wonder if, they were in good shape, would I have opted to preserve them in my effort to keep some of the modern flavor?...

Besides the baby racoons...

...the gutter being used as a chimney flu.

And many layers down, flooring in the exact odd color I'd picked for my paint. whoa.

Nothing too exciting in our kitchen gut, but we did find some old letters that had dropped down inside the island. Our neighbors are still in touch with the previous owners, so we passed them along to them to get back to them.

Like the OP, though, I did find a bunch of old things we never use - mainly it seems to be water bottles, mugs, glasses that just seem to reproduce on their own. Even though we have more cabinet space than we did before, I'm getting rid of a bunch of them - they'll never be used! Now I just have to get them to the donation center.

In our current house:

Tree roots coming up through the concrete in the middle of our kitchen. They had bent our sink's copper piping so much the piping had to be replaced and of course, the roots were cut back as much as possible and a concrete patch put in.

An empty, unopened can of Billy Beer.

In a house we lived in 30 years ago:

While removing gold veined mirrored squares from one wall in the living room the previous owners installed, we found a complete built-in buffet.

A penny in every nook, cranny and cupboard.

Jodi-

While it's not something turned up while packing, when my old sunroom was torn down to put in the kitchen addition, a partially built bomb shelter was found under the floor (It's not clear how this thing was going to accessed). It was probably abandoned due to the very high water table; I can't see how they could have kept the water out. The structure was filled with soil, and took two days and two backhoes to dig out.

I had two concrete-lined pits under my old house in rural east Texas. The old man next door (my father called him "the Oracle" because his sister had built the house and he knew everything about it) said they were from an old gravity heater(s?). They had some water and probably all kinds of nasties. I suppose we should have filled them in. Or closed off access to the open foundation?