1999 - Attic Storage

Most houses in this part of the country have full basements, and those basements become storage places for all those things that we don't use in everyday life. You know, Christmas decorations, kids old toys, clothes that have shrunk, and the list goes on.

We have a lot of storage items and the basement on this house is not desirable for storage. First it is terribly small and filled with the essentials of life, furnace, water heater, and other basic mechanical things.

Then there is the humidity problem and the danger of flooded basements in the event the sump pump fails. So we planned a second floor storage area that would provide clean dry storage. This image shows the 8' X 22' storage place as we started the sheet rock. The old house sheathing can be seen on the right, this was the North gable of the 1930 house.

This picture was taken at the same time looking from the East end of the room. This space is above the mud room and kitchen addition. It will not be heated but does have insulation to keep it from getting too cold. Our unheated garage remains above freezing and we expect this to do the same.

In all of these pictures you will see the doorways that lead to the attic areas for future maintenance needs.

The two pictures (to the left and lower right) show the sheet rock as we taped it. I installed the two, 8-foot high output fluorescent fixtures over the long center seam in the sheet rock. These type of fixtures will light down to 32 degrees without any warm-up which will be an asset in this cold storage area.

This is one of those projects that we started planning the day we decided to buy the house and remodel it. We had seen a basement storage area in one house that I worked on as a carpenter and just knew we could do it better. So now that it is nearly finished we know we did it better.!

The last two pictures show the room once we had the shelving installed and the boxes moved it. We still need to get some permanent flooring down (we plan to move the old sunroom carpet into this area) along with some baseboard and door casing. But it is usable and reminds us of how much sorting we need to do, so much STUFF