We moved into our +150-year-old heritage house 4 years ago and STILL haven’t opened the attic!
We jumped at the chance to move dead centre into the heritage area of this small town in our home Canadian island province.
Carbonear, established in the early 1600’s, is one of the oldest permanent settlements in Newfoundland and among the oldest European settlements in all of North America.
The town is steeped in so much history including Irish Legends and even PIRATES that have left the town with a mysterious and adventurous character that was the perfect draw for us to move here! And with so much history comes many exciting opportunities to explore.
Old houses have so many opportunities for surprises! Like when we uncovered an underground root cellar behind our shed and found over 100 YEARS of antique items and keepsakes.
Our neighbour in Burin even found an old bank safe amongst many other vintage finds in her basement!
Who doesn’t love finding hidden treasure! So for us the attic, especially having never had one before, has always been a point of curiosity.
We’ve never been up there before though because the second-floor ceiling was completely boarded up. Which only made it seem even more mysterious. So for years we just tried to not think about the unknown up there.
Though one time when we opened the outdoor attic vent from the outside, the house became filled with the most putrid of smells. Like, a SERIOUSLY gag worthy rotten smell to the point that we thought something must have died in the attic and would be in immediate need of exploration.
But we figured out the smell was the pallet bed that we had built the same day. A skunk had sprayed one of the pallets??? WTF? But mystery solved and the secret attic lived to see another day….
But today NO MORE as our curiosity has FINALLY gotten the best of us!! We needed to get into that attic!!
After knocking on the whole ceiling, the guest bedroom closet is where it sounds hollow and is our best bet for a way in!
So we went in for the cut and bingo! Was just a quarter inch of wood before direct open air access to the attic. We’re in!
Now, to jerry rig a periscope by taping two phones to a selfie stick to poke up there to explore the scene!
We asked you guys what you thought we would find up there and you guessed old newspapers, spiders, the Never-ending Story book, Nan’s knitting, spiders, Chevy Chase watching home movies, insulation and SPIDERS!
There’s a reason why we decided to open the attic in winter and it’s for that EXACT reason, so there’d be no surprise bugs falling on us!!!
But here goes nothing. And well here’s what we saw….
So it seems like there’s nothing to see here? Nothing stored up there or anything that seems out of place. Very happy to see that the attic is at least well insulated and the roof looks in great condition but from our somewhat limited view, there’s no surprises in site.
But still more to come as you never know what you’re going to find when renovating old houses and you won’t know what surprises are hiding beneath the surface unless you look! Like at @BrigusBiscuitBox in Brigus who started renovating a house just like ours and every day is sharing photos of old antiques he’s finding hidden in the walls and under the floor! Very fun stuff so go give him a follow on Instagram.
Really makes us wonder what we would find under our floors…hmmmm. Follow along here for more stories as we continue to explore Newfoundland’s Past and Present!
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Much love,
Chris and Larry
