The Mystery Room

Newsletter 2025-01-12

There’s a mystery room in my house. It’s hidden behind a steel door that only locks from the outside. Beyond that metal barrier lurks an eerie cold and, more dangerously, a low ceiling. That’s more of a threat to my head than any ghost. The room is an unfinished attic, and it’s full of totes and boxes whose contents remain unknown to any mortal being. My wife remembers what’s in them, but she doesn’t count because she keeps track of them with her supernatural wifely powers that let her know where all things are at all times. The secret is that the totes are empty. Whatever she wants simply appears in front of her, like a miniature Room of Requirement encased in Tupperware. That doesn’t explain why the totes are so heavy when I pick them up. Perhaps the magical world knows what I really need is something ungainly to move around. I wish the mystical forces of the universe would stop conspiring to make me workout.

You might be confused when I claim my attic is a mystery room because I sleep there. It’s one of the reasons we bought this house. The large, Victorian structure had an unfinished attic that spanned the entire third floor. When we moved in, roofing nails protruded dangerously from the slanted ceilings, making it look like Hellraiser in house form. The insulation was between the second story ceiling and the attic floor, leaving the attic itself unprotected from the temperatures of the outdoors. It was scorching in the summer, freezing in the winter, and perfectly comfortable for exactly one day every fall and spring. That discouraged us from storing too much up there. Only some of my auxiliary items could survive being melted and flash frozen on a recurring basis. That wasn’t the only reason we didn’t fully utilize the space. It was three stories above the Earth. The only way things would get up there is if I carried them, which was a long way to go. It was a much shorter trip to take items to the trash cans outside. My lack of cardio and upper body strength saved us from becoming pack rats, which was a very real danger. Our unfinished, uninsulated attic offered nearly endless storage space. If only it weren’t located in low earth orbit.

Sometime after we had our fourth and final kid, we got around to renovating the attic. We had finished our family; now we needed to finish our house. We wanted another floor where we could escape all these kids. That had been our long-term plan all along. We figured that someday we’d hire a contractor and put something amazing on the top tier. When we first moved in, it was hard to imagine that we would ever run out of space on the main two floors. Lola and I were just twenty-two. Instead of buying a modest starter home, we opted to go with a giant (by our standards) house that loomed over the rest of the block. Only a year earlier, we had both lived in dorm rooms roughly the size of prison cells. From there, we moved briefly into an eight hundred square foot apartment before jumping into a three thousand square-foot, four bedroom, two bathroom house. The price was right, and so were the circumstances. The prior owners were desperate to sell. They were going through a divorce—hopefully not because of the stress of maintaining an old house, but we can’t rule it out. They had an offer that was contingent on the buyer selling their own house, which they hadn’t been able to do in a year. If we were wiser, we might have seen that as a sign of the coming 2008 housing market collapse, which struck in full force just months after we bought the place. We didn’t foresee any of that. All we knew was that this was a place we could afford, and that if we bought it, we would likely never have to move again. If we ever ran out of space, we could simply finish that rugged room in the sky. As if we would ever really need to. Who could possibly have that many kids?

For years, our house was largely empty. We had entire bedrooms with no furniture in them. Lola and I were different people in those days. We invited over our college friends to play beer pong at the dining room table. It wasn’t like we had anything nice that could be damaged. All of our furniture came from dumpsters and estate sales. I’d sarcastically claim that our neighbors must have been thrilled, but we didn’t have any. To one side was a tiny church with no members, and to the other was a house turned into a business where no one worked. That was bad for the local economy but great for us. The only downside was the isolation. If our high school or college friends wanted to hang out with us, they had to drive in from another city, or, in my case, another state. Luckily, we had plenty of bedrooms for them when they got here. They just had to be okay with sleeping on the floor. That might explain all of their back problems today.

Gradually, and with great reluctance, we grew up. We had our oldest daughter, Betsy, in 2010, roughly two years after we moved in. Children came fast and furious after that, with the emphasis on “furious.” We had another baby every two years until our youngest, Waffle, who arrived after a mere seventeen month gap. Suddenly, our big empty house didn’t seem quite so big or quite so empty. The proximity didn’t help. All three bedrooms were right next to each other on the second floor. (The fourth bedroom wasn’t really a bedroom. Based on its size and location, it was better used as an office, or, in our extremely normal family, a pig room.) The kids were stacked on top of each other, and on top of us. There wasn’t much privacy. The master bedroom door had a sliding lock I installed myself that, depending on the season and the tilt of the house that day, might or might not have lined up to actually latch shut. After spending so much time building up our family, it was time to escape it. We hired a contractor to renovate our attic. We were literally moving up.

Like all renovations, this one took twice as long and cost twice as much as the initial quote. The final amount was about half the purchase price of the house. Like all contractors, ours had trouble showing up. He completely disappeared by the end, leaving the final five percent or so of the job undone. That was especially egregious when you consider that part of the space was supposed to be left unfinished by design. The new master bedroom and bathroom had both insulation and HVAC support. We splurged for luxuries like keeping our living space livable. That didn’t extend to the closet. It covers a long, L-shaped section on one whole side of the bedroom under the eves. Squeezing the closet into every nook and cranny of that half of the former attic gave us nearly infinite space for clothes but not much room for heads. That doesn’t bother Lola. I have to duck, but she could do jumping jacks in there. The closet is insulated, but it doesn’t have any vents. If we want it to get hot or cold air from the rest of the room, we have to leave one of the closet doors open a crack. Otherwise, before I get dressed, I’ll have to knock down icicles. Who needs cold showers when you have an old house? Just getting out of bed here is extreme.

Those temperature swings seem moderate compared to the final space on the third floor. That’s the attic, or what’s left of it. It’s behind a steel door on the opposite side of the room from our closet. It has even more linear feet of storage than the closet under an even more slanted ceiling. To enter it, I have to bend over at the waist like I’m entering a Victorian coal mine. There’s a reason they used compact child laborers. There’s not even enough room for me to turn around. If I go down one way and want to go back, I have to crouch scoot backwards. Instead of a wood floor, the remaining unfinished attic space has the cheapest linoleum squares that loose change could buy. They’re great for sliding around plastic totes, which are the main inhabitants of the room. Clothes and decorations that are out of season all get stacked in a single row under the steepest part of the slant. The space is also the permanent home of the middle seats that we took out of our minivans, leftover fitness gear I no longer use, and the free author copies of my various books that I never sold or gave away. It’s a nicer storage space than our basement because, while it gets hot and cold, it stays dry. My leftover books might burst into flames, but they’ll never mold. I always hoped my writing career would end in a blaze of glory instead of mildew.

The unfinished attic space is more than just storage; it’s also a powerful symbol of inequality. I’d like to believe Lola and I split all household tasks evenly, but the totes in the attic prove otherwise. Every article of clothing in them was purchased by her. She decides what gets moved from the totes to various dressers, what gets put back in long-term storage, and what gets given away. It’s for the best that I’m out of the clothing loop. I can barely handle dressing myself. I’m only brought into the picture if the kids require something in bulk. When Betsy needed half a dozen identical copies of black running shorts, I had her covered. All shopping should take less than thirty seconds and be done entirely from my phone. Actually going to the store is a form of torture.

In my mind, anything that goes into the attic is meant to be forgotten—if I knew it existed in the first place. That’s why I was shocked Saturday when I saw all the contents of the attic come out. As usual, it was my own fault. I started the afternoon by leading my kids in the effort to put away the Christmas decorations. We filled up two holiday totes in short order after I figured out which child was causing the most problems and made them do chores by themselves in another part of the house. The key to good parenting is selective banishment. But before I returned the holiday totes to their attic prison, Lola decided to clean out and organize the entire space. Toddler clothes and shoes from ages past suddenly filled our bedroom. The memories came flooding back. As traumatized as I was to remember that my children used to be smaller, the kids took it even worse. It was up to them to go through the hand-me-downs from their sisters and determine what they would and wouldn’t wear. This was after I promised them that, if they helped me take down the Christmas tree, they’d be done with chores for the day. They should have known their mom could alter the deal. I lack the authority to make binding contracts in this house.

To their credit, the kids got to work. Together with Lola, they went through everything, discarding massive bags of stuff that will now make their way to other families with smaller kids, to second-hand stores, or to a dumpster. It was an unexpected but brutally efficient decluttering that would have made Marie Kondo proud. The best part was it barely involved me. Whatever was left is now back in its attic lair, where it will remain until the next round of surprise cleaning in a decade or two. The next time we go through it in detail, it will likely be to pass down clothes to grandkids—if there are any clothes left. There’s no way to know what’s in there. As soon as I send this email, I’ll once again forget that our attic exists. That steel door in our bedroom will forever conceal a mystery.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James