Disclosure: this post may contain affiliate links, which means I may make a commission if you decide to make a purchase through one of my links, at no cost to you.
**GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED**
Happy Halloween, folks! Here’s your treat:
Obviously, you don’t eat it, but I do think you’ll enjoy it. As you may have already read about in my last post, I made over my back yard’s concrete patio for less than $100 thanks to Olympic’s Rescue It! Deck and Concrete Resurfacer.
And today, I’m giving you the chance to try it out yourself. But instead of just giving away the paint, Olympic has put together an entire #PrepMatters kit for one lucky reader. And since I hate giveaways that have 100 different entry options, let’s keep this simple, shall we?
#PrepMatters Kit Includes: Up to three gallons of Rescue It! Deck and Concrete Resurfacer; up to 2.5 gallons of Olympic Deck Cleaner; and one Lowe’s gift card valued at $25 (for your use to purchase the other materials you might need for this project, such as a paint brush/roller/tray kit, outdoor caulk, or sandpaper if you’re redoing your deck).Number of winners: 1Contest ends: Thursday, November 6thEligibility: U.S. residents onlyHow to enter: I’m using Rafflecopter to run this giveaway (just because it makes things a lot easier to pick a winner), but since you know how I like to have a little fun with giveaway comments, I’d like to know: What was the funniest or weirdest thing you’ve ever found in your back yard?
Good luck!
Gosh, I think I have a pretty boring backyard. We’ve only been here a year and haven’t done much digging around. Other than the plastic tags that identify plants, a couple random bottle tops and some buried coal (old firepit?), we’ve found nothing that falls into the funny or weird categories.
Weirdest thing ever – after a tornado, finding dead birds all over the backyard among huge pieces of hail.
Wish I had something exciting here… not much going on in my backyard, except a patio that needs some TLC :)
We constantly find broken glass. Glad we had at least a couple years to get a head start on gathering it before we started having kids!
Deer! and not just the “I’m passing through and having a snack” kind, but the entire herd of 11 bedded down for the night just outside our bedroom window.
we find dried fish heads and other parts. we live near a lake and the hawks, ospreys and eagles sit in the trees and on poles eating what they catch and drop the rest
I found some broken eggs on my patio this summer. One on each side of my table and another one under my grill. If someone was trying to egg my house, their aim was really off! I can still see a stain from one of them. Maybe I should have tried some Olympic Deck Cleaner :)
Have lived in my house for 5 years and thought that any random toys from the little boy that lived here had been discovered. But last month I found a little, lego astronaut in the grass. He’s now sitting on my shelf.
Nails, not so strange but we are talking about tons of rusty nails!
We are constantly digging things up in our back yard – mostly rocks of various sizes, but over the last 7 years we have slowly found 3 horseshoes…..waiting to find the 4th for a complete set!
The weirdest thing I’ve found has to be something my puppy has destroyed. We’ve found missing shoes in the backyard that are torn up, we fount kiddie pool parts, pieces of dog toys….you name it!
A rusty slayer necklace is I think the weirdest thing we’ve found.
I find old toys, screws and nails, broken glass, and old beer caps buried in my backyard all the time. My two dogs like to dig. Lol
Our neighbors nectarine tree hangs over our yard, so in the fall I would find my dogs poo full of nectarine pits.
The weirdest thing I found in my backyard was a huge snakeskin – ew!
My backyard was full of nonsense… but I think the best thing I found was an old metal and plastic chaise outdoor chair BURIED UNDER THE POOL. We sold the above ground pool when we moved in, and under was lots and lots of sand. And also, a tetnus-y rusted whole lawn chair. Who on earth left that there during the pool installation? lol.
When we moved in we found a pair of underwear about 25 feet up in one of our trees. Must have been a party house.
We have found deer antlers, and an old ornate appetizer fork!
I spotted a turkey in my yard a couple early mornings not too long ago. Not too weird, except we live in the city now and we didn’t even see turkeys in our yard when we lived in more rural areas.
Does front yard count? The day after moving into my house, we found a car in our front yard (in our fence). It had been t-boned in an accident and flew into our yard/fence.
We just moved in, and our dog has been making herself at home. So we often find our clothes or throw blankets in her doghouse. Oh yes, and there was that one day she decided to try to eat a box of 96 Crayola crayons…
We consistently find stuffed animals that have been torn up by my dogs, but the stuffed animals haven’t ever belonged to us. It’s the strangest phenomenon.
We live in my husband’s grandmother’s home and she was a master gardener. She has been gone for several years and my husband pretty much neglected the garden. The first year I lived here it was so much fun to see what plants and flowers would grow and bloom from under the weeds. Year by year I’m slowly working on cleaning it up and making it the beautiful garden it once was. The patio still needs a lot of work. My favorite finds were the tiny handprints in the corners of the patio that were made by my father-in-law and his sister when they were 3 and 5 years old. I’m looking forward to getting a picture of my son with his hands in his grandad’s prints next summer.
The weirdest thing that I have ever found in my backyard was when I came home from work one day and all my potted plants were moved around and rearranged. My husband swears he didn’t do it, so who was in my fenced in backyard?
Oh geez. I was ecstatic about the raised garden bed in the yard when we moved in. Of course, once I started digging, it was a different story. I found plastic grocery bags that I assume were used as a weed barrier, egg half shells, sea shells, petrified banana peels and chicken bones. I’m guessing (HOPING, FERVENTLY HOPING) that there was a bit of half-assed composting going on, because otherwise there ain’t no garden bed – there be a voodoo hoodoo coffin-sized crate in my yard!
The strangest thing I found in my backyard was a bunch of old wire sheeting when we first moved in. Who knows where it came from!
We live in Dahlonega, GA, site of the 1st US Gold Rush. Our backyard property line is a small creek, and when walking the property with our landscaper, we found what looked to be an old mining refuse cairn next to the creek with a tree growing out of the top. Apparently you can find those all over the place around here.We still need to investigate further to see what else we find.
This is so disgusting but we found a pig’s head in our backyard – a gift from our collie. The next day, we installed the underground dog fence!
My parent’s dog comes over to our place sometimes and always chases some type of animal out of the bushes. This past summer the dog had something but we didn’t see it run away- needless to say it was a baby turtle! Ever since the turtle has lived with us as our daughter’s pet.
We live in the country and there is a field in our backyard, so manure?
Foot prints of deer!
My son wanted a metal detector for his birthday, and I found old Buffalo Nickels and a Silver dime in my backyard.
A pet cemetery (well the little handmade cross grave marker)! It is way up on a hill in the backyard. There is a bench on the top of the hill, and when we walked up there on move-in day to sit and check out the view, it was just a glance to the left.
Back when we rented a house we found an old pair of underwear when raking leaves. Very odd…
We recently found an old cement roller/press thing (sorry, don’t know what it’s really called) out in our “back forty” tree line (our yard is really only about .5 acres total, but I like to call the tree/brush line at the back that, lol).
That’s pretty hard, but it would probably be an armadillo, because we don’t ever see them in this part of the country.
The weirdest thing we found in our backyard had to be a rodent skull. Actually it was creepy, so so creepy. The dog dug it up! We were all so freaked out…..
A large cast iron frying pan. Considered finders-keepers, but returned it to the restaurant next door. How it go in my yard is a continuing mystery.
My house is over fifty years old, so I have found (and continue to find) plenty of things in the yard. The funniest has to be parts to an old Mr. Potato Head toy (the nose and the pink ear). The strangest has to be old appliance knobs.
I have only found mostly trash in my yard. nothing exciting or funny
We don’t find anything too exciting other than our neighbors’ lawn furniture that occasionally blows into our yard when it storms!
Congrats Katie! You’re the winner of the giveaway! Be on the lookout for my email & send me your info!
It is just as embarrassing for me to write, but my underwear. My dog decided to get into the laundry hamper and display my undies all over the back lawn. :)
The weirdest thing I have found in my backyard is what we think was a cow’s femur bone… We live in the center of an urban city…but we think it was put there, along with other random bones, by the super weird previous owners of our house.
I’m jealous! I never had my own back yard (having always lived in apartments), but this past summer some friends excitedly showed me a partial skeleton of an as-of-yet-unidentified skeleton of a critter that just showed up in their yard one day! My guess is a bird of prey dropped it, or something else dragged it in. I’m a biological anthropologist, so of course I took it. I would’ve taken that cow femur and all the other random bones, too! ;)
One time at my old house I found a really really old looking spoon buried in the ground. I was young and ended up throwing it away but thinking back it may have been something special!
We spent the summer clearing out the overgrowth in our new (115 year old) backyard. We found a stash of empty whisky bottles hid behind the stone wall and a grey wig. The wig really scared me because I found it while digging. Apparently, I need to stop watching so many crime shows.
We find rocks, rocks, and more rocks. We clean up one space, and the next day rocks are back. It’s a mystery.
The weirdest thing I ever found in the backyard is bars of ivory. Slender strips of whitish grey ivory, i’m not sure where they came from..
There is a huge slab of concrete, too big to dig up, so it is just buried under the grass.
I just moved into my first house, so I haven’t found anything weird yet…haha.
I live in Alaska so, not weird for me, but probably to the rest of the world, I often find moose grazing in my backyard!
Possums. Ew. (Also, second on hating entries with 50 entry options–thanks for keeping it simple!)
An extremely large (non-poisonous) spider that had strung a web about 5 feet in diameter between two tiki torches I have mounted on my back porch. Scared the crap outta me.
Well, we found an ocean in our backyard once… ; ) No, but seriously, we live on the beach in Hawaii so we have all sorts of stuff that pops up in our “backyard”: air craft carriers, thousands of gallons of molasses (no fun), and ocean kayakers. I think my favorite is the monk seal we spotted one day catching a nap and some sun on the beach behind our house. We hardly ever see them because our reef is dead so it was a really fantastic sight.
I found a puppy with a baggie of dog food and a note saying “I need a home!” I had just come home from the hospital with my baby girl and had a 1 year old son so I definitely couldn’t keep it. Two other puppies were left in other neighbors’ yards so my neighbors came and got the puppy in our yard and found it a home.
Aww – well at least they found a home. And it would seem someone must have cared enough to give them food & try to find them a home (though definitely not the best way to go about it). Glad it had a happy ending!
The strangest thing I’ve found in my back yard is a non-dog fearing squirrel who loves to play with my black lab.
The funniest thing I’ve seen in our backyard was our poodle, who never barks, barking ferociously at a floating plastic bag.
My kids think it’s pretty awesome that we find deer tracks in our yard, garden, etc
The funniest think I’ve found in our backyard was once in summer my neighbor was over visiting and we were walking through my garden admiring the flowers/veggie patch and she screamed and ran when she saw a black snake…..that sent me screaming and running which sent the dog to start barking crazy…..my husband came out because of all the commotion and after investigating looked at us crazy because it was just the black hose on the ground.
After we moved into our house we found a sweater stuffed into a tree not sure what that was all about! Since then, we occasionally find really random stuff that our neighbors throw into our yard, like a half eaten tortilla or candy wrappers – those are less funny and more annoying!!!
Wow! I don’t think I have ever found anything too weird or funny in my yard. I guess I live in boring places. My house in Wyoming did have a rockin’ view of the mountains though!!
When we moved into our house, we found an old porn dvd disc near the back fence… pretty sure one of our neighbors behind us threw it over the fence. Why, we’ll never know, but it was super weird!
Haha… that’s so odd, I would have written a whole post about it if that had happened to me!
Well, its not very weird, but kind of cool instead. We live in central Texas and our house sits on top of a lot of rock and limestone. We wanted to plant a tree in our backyard, but had to rent a jackhammer to get through some of the rock. We made it through the rock only to realize, that below it was an opening to a cave. There is a public cave about 15 miles from our house and the part of the cave we found under our yard is part of the cave that is not open to the public.
i would have to say that it was the time i walked out my back door and almost stepped on a snake eating a frog it wasnt funny for me but it was funny for my dad who laughed his butt off at my reaction
Weirdest thing we found in our backyard is an old musket ball.
Nothing too crazy, but over the years I’ve unearthed a large slab of bluestone, some Legos & other toys, pieces of broken ceramics, and what looked like a piece of a manual tiller
A headstone for Bubbles the dog from 1945
Not so much weird but a dreaded curse is some ever growing bamboo. That stuff has the ability to grow 5 feet in a week come growing season! So maybe a spruced up patio will deflect from the forest of bamboo trying to grow in my yard :)
I had the same problem with one of my neighbors! She had bamboo growing right in front of the fence that separated our yards. Bamboo has nearly destroyed her fence and I kept having to fight off shoots of it from growing into my yard. Luckily she seemed to figure it out that it’s too invasive and cut it all down, so the problem is much more manageable. Hope you get rid of it soon :)
I find marbles every time i dig in the yard. They are scattered all over the place.
It wasn’t really a found thing, but I almost ran over a baby bunny with the lawn mower in my back yard and it nearly scared the pants off of me!
a momma alligator and her 8 babies that just hatched
The weirdest thing I have found in my backyard are dog toys that don’t belong to my dogs. I don’t know if my neighbors, who all have dogs, accidentally threw them over the fence or if they are just giving my dogs toys to shut them up when they are in the backyard. I have a feeling it’s no accident.
we bought a “fixer upper” (thats what we are calling gross old houses fallen into disrepair right?) complete with a rotted out tree house, with, wait for it, custom stained glass windows.
WE HAVE A VERY LARGE MEAN SNAKE THIS SUMMER!! YUCK
In our old backyard I found a vintage medication bottle buried in the grass
A hawk with a freshly caught chipmunk for lunch.
Just yesterday I was raking, when all of the sudden a Halloween plastic bag floated down to the ground from my oak tree. Sadly, there was no candy inside. Still confused how it got in my 20 ft. oak.
The weirdest thing I’ve found in my back yard was a skunk. Maybe not so weird as SCARY!
We found an old iron log grate for the fireplace – the kind that holds the logs in a wood burning fireplace. Our house was converted to having a gas fireplace, and apparently the previous owners just tossed the old iron grate into the backyard to get overgrown/be a decorative item rather than give it away or throw it away.
Not in my backyard, but my poor neighbors – I always accidentally lose my dog’s toys in the neighbors’ yards when they riccochet off the fence :(
In the backyard of the house I grew up in, we one time found a pair of women’s underwear and a used condom (ugh) right next to one of our lounge chairs. Needless to say, it got hosed down pretty well!!
Gross. Lots of bleach would be my solution!
Stray neighborhood cats hanging out…. not so strange, but we live in a townhouse so there’s not much room to find stuff back there!
Car parts, broken glass and matchbox cars kept rising up out of the dirt in the yard of one of our houses. I would rake everything up and the next week, more! The previous people had their kid play out there, weird.
I love this stuff. Used it on my deck and it really made a huge difference.
I found a goat in the backyard once. It became a neighborhood pet, moving from one place to the next. LOL
there is a creek that runs through my parents backyard, and we found an old collapsed wooden bridge just under the gravel and dirt at the bottom of a deep bend while swimming one summer as kids.
I found a snake, and I did not enjoy finding him!
I found a 12 foot deep hole under a cement slab. A cistern. As soon as my 78 year old neighbor saw it, I could NOT stop him from getting down IN it! ( He got out safely again)
I have a family of rabbits and a ton of squirrels that call my backyard home. I planted some pumpkins this year, and the rabbits and squirrels ate them like a buffet. I had 10 pumpkins and it only took 2 weeks for them to be all but eaten.
Then you may enjoy these sneaky squirrels who were caught in the act!
We just moved into a new to us last September with tons of wonderful trees in the back yard. While raking leaves, we find an old plastic sandbox that a huge tee had grown through. It must have been like that for years because this tree is probably 30 feet tall.
my neighbor
I found a skunk once and I thought it was a cat at first since I’d never seen one.
The weirdest thing I found in my backyard was a gravestone. Not one of those ancient 1900’s one but one from 1976. Yes, I read what was on it and it creeped me out and made me look around my yard looking for a telltale hump. After that I was afraid to dig in the yard and disturb some poor soul. Yes, when I left my house I left the stone under a tree and warned the new homeowners about it to avoid any legal problems. They were actually pretty cool about it.
Glass. Lots of glass. Not sure what happened in my back yard before we came along but when we moved in I raked up a ton of glass and even since we’ve let our dog out there who LOVES to dig, even though he knows he’s not supposed to, he has dug up pieces of glass. Thankfully, we’ve been able to deter him from digging since we’ve discovered this.
Nothing comes to mind, but now I’m thinking that I should bury random items for a future resident to find.
Nothing strange or funny but we have a family of deer that love to hang out in the back yard and drive our dogs nuts. We constantly see them in our yard and throughout our neighborhood.
This year a RANDOM tomato plant grew out of our fire pit wood pile! It just showed up one day and produced so many tomatoes it was crazy!
We haven’t found anything weird in our backyard, Mostly just rocks that seem to come back every year, no matter how many times we rake/pick them up.
A tree! I realize that in itself sounds strange or weird, but let me explain. It was a huge oak tree and it was laying on its side! A storm had come through the night before and this gigantic tree had fallen right outside my bedroom window. I never heard a thing! And that is the reason it was weird.
I went to work that morning and when I came home that afternoon I looked out my kitchen window. To my total surprise there was that huge tree!
I only wish I had a picture to attach! :-)
Not strange or weird, but a bit unusual in this part of the country. We have a lot of wildlife: Deer, turkey, etc. and we also have one jet black squirrel.
I found a brand new 6 pack of beer in my wooded back yard. I am sure there was a very sad neighbor teenager.
Very fortunately I have founded a very old and rare piece of coin. I have kept that in my home as a souvenir. I was very excited and still I can feel an excitement of owning such an antique piece of coin. :)
Would love to win this – we are on the verge of hiring out to have our concrete pad re-done. Winning this would allow us to save the money. Thanks for the chance to win!
stuffed bunny animal and other kids toys
I found 6 frisbees that the neighbor kid had thrown over the fence when we weren’t home!
I found a cat skeleton intertwined with a down wire deep under the overgrown bushes in my yard.
My husband and I just bought a house with an old deck that needs some work! Haven’t found much in the backyard yet except several golf balls and a basketball.
A snake eating a frog! Underneath my hostas…
cat that was living there with her kittens
Congrats to the winner!!! Its always exciting to win something you need:)>.