When we built our house a wasp moved in the attic (the stinging kind). We have a ladder to it in the garage. I opened the ladder down once, only once. A huge wasp nest is in there . The pest control guy opened once, just once. He said he didn’t get paid enough to sort that out.
Nothing. There’s a space up there, but there’s no usable floor and no ladder, and I’m not sure I’d even fit through the hatch if I wanted to try to get myself in there.
Thank you, it’s always nice to know a joke landed.
Unfortunately, I had to look up ISWYDT, to see what you, did there.
On a serious note, I live in a mobile home, so I don’t have an attic.
We keep a bunch of boxes of stuff that we never went through when we moved in up there and my wife rotates out winter and spring clothing to the attic. I also have a box of stuff from earlier relationships up there that I couldn’t part with, but now after 20 years of happy marriage is just a bunch of stuff. I also have my body armor and gas mask from my work in Iraq that I’m not sure what to do with.
Don’t have one now, but when I was a kid we stored the Christmas/Halloween decorations there. My dad had a ton of old textbooks kept up there, as if engineering textbooks from 25 years ago are still relevant.
My wife and I purchased an old, 1930’s vintage house from the estate after the original owners passed. The attic access was very awkward, a trapdoor with a hanging chain and sliding stairs. When extended, the stairs touched the mop-board of the facing wall, so you had to step over the side to get on it, instead of being able to go straight up. Add in the cables and pulleys, and it was just too much trouble to use.
About 8 years after we’d been living there, I needed to access the ceiling above one of the bedrooms, as I was installing an overhead fan where none had existed before. As I slid way over to where I needed to be, I discovered an old rifle and a shotgun wrapped up in a wool blanket. Both were manufactured in the '60s, but nothing valuable.
A .22 rifle, of which I already had a few, and a single-shot .410 shotgun, which I did not, so that was kind of neat.
I could imagine a non-gun household with children would have been furious, though.
My new to me house has two house attics, a garage attic, a full basement, a small fifth bedroom used for storage, and a utility room. The house is giant, and very old. Not even mentioning the hay loft in the stable (which is normally filled with hay), and the three other outbuildings. In the house attics: nothing. We added depth to the rafters for more loft, re-insulated (poorly done the first time, 30 years ago), and relaid the floor boards, but with all the other storage spaces, we don’t need any of that space. We do have stuff in the garage attic which is of four kinds: 1. our daughter’s stuff we moved from our last house attic, mostly her artwork she has no place for. 2. a friend’s stuff when she went footloose and had no place to store anything. 3. a few things I haven’t quite figured out where to put, mostly sculpture. House doesn’t lend itself to sculpture. 4. miscellaneous things like ice chests, a keyboard, a quilt I never finished, nothing related to anything else.
I tend to move things on that I don’t think I’ll use again, so all our storage spaces are rather bare.
I keep the Christmas stuff in the small bedroom, easier to get at. Also the travel stuff, the extra dog stuff. I have a lot of dog stuff like crates, bedding, reflective tarps for cars, that I probably won’t use again but I’m not getting rid of it until my two old dogs pass on.
You need to be careful about that. While I don’t remember the details, I remember reading in the last couple years someone had done this and was renting it out (to students?). There was a fire and some couldn’t escape–only the one way in and out. And of course attic floors are not designed to hold a lot of weight.
Even if the building permit doesn’t require you to build a fire escape, it is a very good idea to provide rope ladders and a hook to fasten them, to any rooms high up a building. Good ladders start at 50 bucks. Cheaper then life insurance.
Insulation, and whatever the HVAC and roof repair guys may have left up there over the years. It’s Florida; the attic is too fucking hot to put things in. Also we have steel shelving around the garage that holds most of our Unimportant Crap.