Installed a kitchen and found a note and a gift from the previous tenants (hooserice88/TIKTOK)
Plumber Peter Allen was called to work at a house in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Monday November 14 and had to move a radiator in one of the rooms.
He made a hole in the wooden floor to locate the plumbing and instead found a whiskey bottle with a rolled up note inside.
The 50-year-old rushed to the living room excitedly to tell the landlady about his findings.
Peter, owner of the plumbing company WF Wightman Plumbing, said the bottle was found under what was probably the housekeeper's room when the house was first built.
"The room is 3 by 5 meters and I accidentally made a hole right around the bottle without knowing it was there. I can't believe it happened," he told BBC Scotland, "I moved a radiator and made a random hole in the floor to find the pipes and there it was. I took it to the woman downstairs and I said 'look what I found under your floor'".
The mother of two, a native of Stimpson, was able to wait to open the bottle until her children - ages 8 and 10 - came home from school.
"When they came back I told them that I had something really exciting to tell them and they asked: 'Are we going to eat sausages for lunch?'" she recalled, "They kept guessing until I told them that we found a bottle with a message in our house. They were really excited and thought that maybe it was a treasure." .
At first they tried to remove the letter with tweezers, but it began to tear.
In an attempt to preserve the letter, Stimpson decided to smash the bottle with a hammer.
"I felt terrible breaking a 135-year-old bottle, but it was the only way to get to the letter," she said, "I kept all the pieces in a Tupperware. We all crowded around the letter and tried to read it. It was so exciting."
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Eventually they discovered that the message was written by several men who worked in the house somewhere in the 19th century.
It read: "James, Ritchie and John Grave laid this floor, but they didn't drink the whiskey. October 6, 1887. Whoever ever finds this bottle can think our ashes are blowing along the way."
Here is the content of the letter:
The National Library of Scotland advised them to store the 135-year-old letter in acid-free plastic.
The family members also plan to put a new letter along with a transcript of the original into the bottle and place it in the same place before the hole in the floor is covered.
Stimpson said: "I ordered some plastic wrap and I think we ended up framing the note with a piece of the bottle, like the neck of the bottle, because it's such an exciting and lovely thing. To think it's been there all this time and could have stayed there forever, it's just amazing. It's Not from the 70s or anything like that, it's much older. It's really cool."
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