When Vancouver Island woodworker Connor Nijsse began removing the drywall in his detatched garage, he was prepared to find mold or even mice.
Instead, he found 115 stuffed animals.
Nijsse and his partner Brianne Hinkkuri purchased their home in Oct. 2023. Hoping to set up the garage as his workshop, Nijsse has been slowly renovating the space.
“I was working by myself on a Sunday night,” Nijsse tells TODAY.com. “I was removing this drywall. I tore a piece off and there’s stuffed animals just staring back at me.”
When Hinkkuri returned home, she filmed a video of Nijsse removing the rest of the drywall to reveal even more stuffed animals.
“Can’t make this s— up,” said Hinkurri in the video, which received over 5 million views on TikTok since it was posted on Oct. 27.
After Nijsse posted the video, a funny thing happened … viewers began to recognize some of the stuffies they remembered from their childhood and asked for them.
The first request was for a fluffy yellow duck. A viewer wrote: “omg my duck!!!!! my fluffy yellow duck I had as a kid until all it’s fluff was patchy and I had put bandaids all over it and my mom threw it out without me knowing 😭 that’s the exact same one for sure on the right side near the bottom. i would 100% buy it off you for my daughter please.”
Nijsse kindly sent two of the ducks to their new home in Ontario, Canada, where they are clearly loved.
The new owner posted her own video with side-by-side photos of her and the prized duck during childhood and now.
The couple has been fielding requests for other stuffies, too.
Most of the stuffed animals are sentimental favorites so they’re just asking requestors to cover the cost of shipping to their new homes in places like Las Vegas, Indiana, South Carolina and the United Kingdom. Nijsse and Hinkkuri are selling some of the more valuable creatures — like rare Beanie Babies, a collectible swan, Kitty Kitty Kittens that purr — to contribute to their renovation. At the moment, they only have 70 left.
“Keeping them in the wall actually kept them in good condition,” Nijsse says.
So far, the couple hasn’t reached out to the previous owners, a couple with three grown children, to figure out exactly why there happen to be stuffed animals hidden in the walls.
“Maybe the former owners ran out of money towards the end and then shoved a bunch of stuffed animals in there,” Nijsse theorizes. “Because why not?”
Hinkkuri plans to keep just three stuffies: a big brown teddy bear, a unicorn that happens to be the same one she lost as a child and a handmade knitted stuffed animal that Nijsse reluctantly agreed to keep in his shop.
“I actually wanted to stick it back in the hall because I thought that would be a funny story for the next person,” he admits.
One question remains: Can stuffed animals actually insulate walls?
Nijsse says that stuffed animals would likely work as insulation for sound but not heat.
