What was the craziest things you’ve found above ceilings?
Many of my service calls involve looking above the ceiling for coils, ductwork, valves. In my career I have found thermometers still in duct, flashlights, screwdrivers I’ve also lost just as many above the ceiling. The craziest thing I found was a half eaten sandwich and two empty beer cans in the ceiling of a school. I couldn’t believe it What have you found?
Boiler Lessons
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There was an ancient bottle of i think it was whiskey either in the attic space above or in a sheetmetal speaker enclosure and i think some ancient beer cans in the attic space above one of our auditoria that was built in the 50's. The speaker enclosure had a door and cam latches on it like a duct access door, clearly made by hvac people and not av people.
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Cigarette butts above a drop ceiling, top of the tile used as an ashtray. Plenum return. Other than that, tools, tools, tools. I to probably lost as many tools as I found.
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You asked...Loaded Firearms, knives and a machete, active rat's nests, hypodermics, naughty magazines, ancient, empty beer cans and bottles, forgotten tools 🔧, vagrants, feral cats, Dead and live Raccoons, shoe box with very old money, jewelry, soiled underwear, women's underwear, drugs, rat 🐀 skeletons and dessicated rat 🐀 carcasses, letters to home (prison), bottles of Liquor…and, of course, discarded pipe, valves, fittings, dirty rags, used Tyvek suits....Mad Dog
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what’s the procedure when you find a gun? I can imagine it would be complicated if you were in New York City.
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how many of those things were dragged there by the rats and larger rodents?
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Sometimes….
Trying to squeeze the best out of a Weil-McLain JB-5 running a 1912 1 pipe system.0 -
@Mad Dog_2 wow you and I work in way different places lol
@mattmia2 It makes you wonder why would anyone choose that place to drink
@EBEBRATT-Ed Cigarette butts? wow. Even when I smoked it would never have done that.
@bjohnhy Nitrous oxide?
In one week, I left a cheap flashlight above a ceiling and found a mag light, it still worked
Ray Wohlfarth
Boiler Lessons1 -
When I did home improvements/plumbing/electrical for a living I would find lots of things, tools, such as screwdrivers, ratchets, wrenches, pliers, hammers, pipe cutters, vice grips, tape measures, found a folding wooden ruler and still have that, speed squares, a t-square, a power drill, a cordless stick vac, rolls of all types of tape.
Lots of weapons such as knives, guns, boxes of ammo, brass knuckles. cans of pepper sprat and mace, slingshots, wrist-rockets and loads of mouse/rat/critter traps.
Lots of clothing items, sneakers and shoes of all sizes, even a wig and hats.
Pieces of trees (real and artificial), house plants, big wads of palms, like those big, long dried out ones Catholic folks in my family used to hand each other on Palm Sunday when I was a kid.
Bunches of wadded up chewed paper that looked like nesting and even tree branches, leaves, old disconnected BX cables and assorted wires.
Dead mice, dead squirrels, dead raccoons, dead 'possums, a couple dead kittens one time, that was sad. Don't know if they were born where I had found them or if their mother placed them there or if they had fallen down a transom.
By the time I retired in 2020 I thought I would NEVER have to see garbage and odd items in walls or floors ever again, but since all of our kids were grown up and out and in their own homes, my wife and I decided that we no longer needed the big 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house we lived and raised our family in for 30+ years, which was also my families home for almost 60 years before that, where I grew up in in the 70's and 80's, so in mid 2021 we sold and moved into our current smaller home by that Sept..
About a year after we moved in, I decided that I hated the tiny old toilet that was in our one bathroom and couldn't stomach the plumbing mistakes that were everywhere, the no ceiling fixture, cracked plaster and ugly woodwork everywhere, but I really just wanted to replace the very small toilet, but when I pulled the old toilet out, half the 1"x1" ugly blue mosaic floor tiles came up with the bowl, so you know, then a whole project began.
I learned that a previous homeowner, who ironically was a fireman and raised his own family here back in the 30's and 40's, in 1950 "rebuilt" the first floor kitchen and second floor bathroom, which is right above the kitchen in our home after he had a kitchen fire!
I was told by an elderly neighbor who knew the guy very well, that after he had an electrical fire and got a skimpy insurance check, he decided to re-do the house himself. and I guess instead of replacing burnt, water damaged, cracked, split and scorched floor joists, rafters and beams, he decided to fill the entire spacing between each floor joist of the small 8'x5' second floor bathroom with cement, about 5000lbs of it, and poured it from heights of 2" to 6" above the floor joists (to level it out) all the way down to the lathing up in the kitchen ceiling below. I guess he though the cement would add some strength to weakened and very uneven joists?
I still can't figure out how all that weight stayed up in place for so many years and held the plaster ceiling below up, but I just had to cut it all out!
I originally thought that it might have just been leveling cement and thought "I could probably break that all off quickly and get down to the wood flooring, fix that up, throw a layer of backer board down and set down new floor tiles", but nope, there was no wood flooring!
The mosaic tile were mostly imbeded right into the cement.
Also buried or covered up in that cement/concrete floor were lots and lots of the original bathroom's hex floor tiles, wall tiles, tons of old shaver razor blades, metal and plastic bottle caps, old, burned disconnected BX cables, old plumbing fixtures, wads of grass and/or hay, pieces of rope, lots of broken bottle glass and a very old metal "Ronsonol" lighter fluid can, that I cleaned and kept.
All the cut off original 1910 water lines and 1950 post fire "new" water lines and steam radiator pipes were also covered up and buried within the cement, valves included!
I ended up filling about 75-80 bags with the concrete and carrying each bag out to the yard and put about 5 bags out with the trash every garbage day for about 4 months.
I cut out and replaced every floor joist, ceiling rafter and wall beam and also every inch of plumbing and electrical and built an entirely new and modern bathroom with a now level floor and also made it longer by 2 feet and wider by 1 foot, which was the most I could "expand" the bathroom.
It is so much nicer and larger now than it was.
One of these days I will transfer all the photos and videos of that project that are on my phone and get them onto this laptop I'm on, just so I can share all that with you folks, since much of the demolition and "discoveries" make for some serious head scratching and rib splitting laughs!
Sorry if it got a bit long, but I thought I'd share the stuff I've found and how I found some of it. LOL
A day that you didn't learn something new IS a day YOU just wasted! (me)
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@Metalguy thats incredible DIYers watch a 30 minute show on HGTV and think they are experts
Ray Wohlfarth
Boiler Lessons2 -
🤮🤮 - wow what a mess, good job tackling that headache!
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i think it was the people that built it, in the 50's i think they could do that.
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I was resisting posting this but @EBEBRATT-Ed pushed me over the edge.
I ask about the rodents and the underwear because I ride my bike through the student housing district on my way to work and about once a year i see a pair of almost always men's underwear in the middle of the sidewalk or street. At first i thought someone had some sort of alcohol related malfunction and just left them there. Then i realized it was people taking their laundry to their parents' house or laundromat or otherwise moving clothes that dropped them. Then i remembered something else i had figured out earlier, you see condoms in the middle of sidewalks and alleys and similar places not exactly conducive to condom use. i relaized that people had thrown them in the trash and rodens found them and dragged them around because of the smell. I think a similar thing happens with the underwear that people drop some animal dragged it in to the middle of the street. I think it is likely some critter was hoarding them in the attic, not that the owner placed them there.
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Some have said NYC is a Sewer, but I wouldn't trade my times here for a Billion Dollars. Mad Dog
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Near the end of a bathroom remodel to make it a bit larger when my mom needed a accessible bathroom, someone was sitting on the toiler when there was a cell phone ring coming from the wall. Yep, one of the carpenters had drywalled his phone into the wall a few days earlier.
While remodeling my current house, behind the drywall was a photo of a high school aged young lady probably from the 1960s which must have been put there there during one of the many remodelings. Not knowing what else to do with her I put her back in the wall where she had spent the last 40 years.
And then there were the three holes under the second layer of subfloor, about 8" diameter and spaced at about three feet apart along one wall. I later learned from a long time neighbor the house had been cobbled together from parts of two buildings that had been surplused at a nearby military base around 1960. The head of my bed is above the former site of three stalls of a communal restroom.
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Recently, while redoing section of old attic stairs, among beer can from the 80s, we also found high school report card from 1987. It had the name and address of our house. The girl, sophmore in HS, wrote "i love Bob" all over it. We have two "Bobs" of "certain vintage" living on our block. When mentionong the name of the girl to one, he said "i think she might had a thing for me back in the day". Oh, we are certain she did!
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Around 1997ish, AC installation in an unfinished basement for the first floor. I was pulling down insulation batts between the ceiling bays to run branch ducts, when I heard something hit the floor that wasn't an insulation batt. I got of the ladder and found a 1950 something Playboy magazine in pristine condition. Before I knew it, the younger guys had it and I haven't seen it since. I remember it wasn't anyone I knew on the cover, so I don't think it was valuable. The homeowners were new, and gay, so it wasn't their's.
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I have definitely come across some interesting things over the years while renovating old buildings in the Portland, ME area.
I have found a newspaper from the 1800s, a voter registration card from the 1920s, jars of baby teeth, old records, baseball cards, hundreds of old Gillette razor blades, old beer cans and bottles, too many dead rodents to count, and during one bathroom renovation, a stack of dirty magazines from the 1980s.
One of the most interesting finds wasn't in a ceiling or wall, but was on a piece of baseboard trim that needed to be taken off during a renovation of an old 1800s house. On the back of that piece of trim was the date and name of the client along with the signature of the architect (John Calvin Stevens - very prominent architect in the late 1800s in Boston and Portland) and all of the workers who had worked on the project.
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Full tank of R-22 with hose connected to the suction of a heat pump. Why bother with a leak check, right?
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well, a copy of Titter mag from the 40’s, along with 6 Trojans in their individual metal containers and in the same spot Grandpas coin collection, which was really something. Gold double eagles, etc. no one was home. Temptation pops up when unexpected, but I came thru and gave it to them. Cat skeleton, 141 Remington & stuff
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I found one of the guys sleeping up in the ceiling.
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Ok. Finding someone sleeping in the ceiling. I was running a job in a hospital, had a lot of work in a hung ceiling in a lab area. Come up the ladder, and there's this guy sound asleep right next to the opening in the ceiling, didn't even have brains enough to crawl in. So I went across the hall and asked one of the nurses for some ice. She gave me a few cubes. Went back climbed up the ladder, held the ice in my hand and dripped ice water right between his eyes. He woke up screaming, dreaming he was having a lobotomy. I damn near fell off the ladder laughing.
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My father drank Rheingold beer and I found his old Rheingold can opener. While researching the beer I came across this bit on wickipedia:
Rheingold's core consumer was working class men. A 2003 New York Times article gave a creative description: "Rheingold Beer was once a top New York brew, guzzled regularly by a loyal cadre of workingmen, who would just as soon have eaten nails as drink another beer maker's suds."
During the cleanup of the World Trade Center rubble after the 2001 collapse, Rheingold cans were found that had been stashed in the beams by construction workers decades earlier.
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Large, old, City buildings in general have lots of hiding spots where guys would "coop." Discovering guys nap spots is a whole 'nother bunch of stories. Mad Dog
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It's amazing the things that people can manage to flush down a gym toilet that then gets clogged in the sewage pumps. Of course there's the usual wipes, tampon sleeves, needles and such, but we've also pulled entire pairs of shorts and padlocks out of the the pumps.
Old NYC buildings have the best random finds and it's not always vintage junk, although the vintage junk is always fun too.
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i assume you're referring to the open gas can :)
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I won't go into a lot of detail on this as I think there is still an active investigation going on, but my discovery started with an intact human baby skeleton above the ceiling. Further demolition in other parts of the building revealed 2 more of the same above the ceiling, and several dozen more buried behind an old stone wall. I also found a dismembered human hand under a 250HP steam boiler in the same building, but we're talking about ceilings here. Some weird stuff happened in that place and I ended up quitting my job after the wall discovery.
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