The attic creeps me out. It stretches from the front of the house to the back, but it’s basically just a crawlspace thing with no standing room unless you’re a child or Mini Me. The only way to get into it (if you aren’t a squirrel) is a tiny opening in the ceiling. In fact, it took me quite a while to even find how to get up there because the opening is almost hidden as a ceiling tile. It’s about 2 feet wide and a foot and a half long.

I’ve been up there twice, but haven’t gotten in very far because, quite frankly, it looks kind of scary and I don’t like how I can’t really see past a certain point, no matter how much light I shine in that direction. There are also squirrels up there crashing for the winter that I don’t feel like coming face to face with at this time.

On my first trip up, I just got up into the opening and looked around but didn’t move much.

This is the view from the opening. That crack looking stuff is actually some Plaster of Paris. I don’t know how long it’s been up there or why. There was also a lot of wood, old windows, screens and some glass. I damn near fell out of the opening when I flipped over a stack of wood and had a creepy painting of a little girl staring back at me. That was a bit unnerving.

From what I gather (and I’m no expert), it looks like something from the early 1900’s and appears to be Easter related since the girl looks to be dressed in an Easter bonnet and is holding a chick. It’s in a nice fancy frame, however time has taken its toll as the frame crumbles in my hands if I handle it too much. This discovery ended my first attic adventure last month.

I went back up yesterday to clear out all the old wood and try to cover up the hole where the squirrels were getting in. It gets pretty noisy up there at times (like the rodents are moving furniture) and I figured all that scrap wood and junk laying around was the cause of it.

After removing the wood, I found out that most of the floor boards in this section of the attic lift right up. That’s odd but not surprising. I suppose they were really never nailed down. This is the only part of the attic that actually has a “floor”. There looks to be that cheap ass fluffy insulation stuff between the main beams past what I like to call “the void”.

I have yet to crawl into that area since one of the two loose floor boards that lead into it actually bent in half when I lifted it up. Don’t want to try my chances with that yet. Also, falling through a ceiling isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Maybe in the future.

Nonetheless, I never got around to nailing up the little hole the squirrels were coming in because I got distracted by some interesting discoveries hidden behind one of the floor boards. I found an obviously old framed picture of some guy, a couple framed needlepoint looking things, an old picture of a home that might be one up the street, and a bag of money.

Ok, no bag of money. The other stuff will be discussed in a post tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 4:56 pm and is filed under History, Interior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.