Old house detecting strategy

Personally I start at the curb strips if there are any. Then the high traffic areas (front walkway and porch area), around gardens, then large old trees and then the rest of the yard. Don't cover it too quickly. I have spent hours in tiny yards. Hit it rom a couple different directions. GL and HH.

jwp1964 said:

Personally I start at the curb strips if there are any. Then the high traffic areas (front walkway and porch area), around gardens, then large old trees and then the rest of the yard. Don't cover it too quickly. I have spent hours in tiny yards. Hit it rom a couple different directions. GL and HH.

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Ditto on this. Also, find the old clothes line, where, if they had one, was the pinic table, the outhouse, the highest spot on the property people would tend to sit on the high spot, I've found a definite correlation here. If there's a "sitting rock" or stone fence/wall, hit those well. Along and around any steps.
As said, hit them more than once, from different directions. There is NO question, you will not find everything in a single hunt. My brother and I had one place (couple acres) that we frequented 10 times and scoured it. It yielded tons of goodies and just when we thought it was done, boom, another good find. In fact, on the last of these 10 trips, I recovered a Barber quarter and a Barber dime, we lost this property as it was sold. Pay attention to where you DO find stuff and really saturate these "nectar sectors". Best of luck.

I have a place I've been hitting off and on for 2 years, been there several hundred hours. Just last week I found a Conestoga bell and some old buttons that I missed. The week before that I found a large cent. Now this is a large farm property, but basically most of what I've done is detect around the house and barn repeatedly.

Grid any areas where you find anything, even trash. If you can do so without tearing things up too much, remove all of the top layer of trash. Then detect again to look for what is buried beneath that. This is why I use multiple trips - don't want to cause too much damage all at once. If the owner is amenable to you coming back, definitely do so.