Secret rooms

Do you have any secret rooms in your house? That you would rather guard from nosy visitors and keep locked if you have a chance? Wherein lies a healthy doze of frozen memories and a dash of guilt, in addition to a lot of stuff you really don’t like, want or need? Don’t worry, we’ve all got them!

Those doors should probably be left closed, but ever since I declared war on procrastination I’ve had an itch to open those closed doors in our home. Those doors that I earlier shied away from, closing my eyes when walking by. Here goes.

Oooops, I did it… The picture to the left shows the nice door we have in the hobby-room on the first floor hiding the old stairway up to the attic among other things. This is no longer used as a stair after the new attic stairway was built so we’ve used it to store away excess paint, materials, tools and miscellaneous during the building process as illustrated on the picture to the right.

For you guys to know what to avoid when you renovate your home, let’s take a closer look at what was actually in there.

Picture to the left: A mix of paintbrushes, toys, garbage, tiles and tools.
Picture to the right: All those leftover pints of paint and the like will not come in handy (although I told myself they juuust might – every time I peeped into this room). Just write down the color code and pass it on to the junkyard (special waste). If you ever wish to repaint your living-room you probably want to use a different color anyway. But it’s a good idea to keep the code in case you just need to repair or freshen it up after a few years. The paint itself should really just go because it will either be too little or too old to reuse.

Our funny little room is now clean and empty and I still have no plan for how to use it. Actually I love the idea of having an empty secret room for the kids to find. One of the great things about this old house are the secret rooms. They’re perfect for playing hide and seek for instance (the visiting kids are clearly at a disadvantage). For instance we have a tiny room under the stair by the kitchen where only our youngest child fits. Then there’s another one quite out of reach above the same stairway (which is definitely where I’d put my secret diary if I had one) and the upper compartment of the old closet by the bathroom functions as a nice hideaway when someone needs to go brooding somewhere private (someone who’s lower than 1,45 meters and less than 45 kilograms, that is).

In regards to the room with the old attic stairway, I will just leave it at that for now; an empty and strange little room that the kids can use as they wish. They might use it to sit and spy on us through the keyhole, make a gallery out of their artwork (lego, dupplo, clay, etc) or their collection of stuffed animals (picture to the left) or put on a puppet-show for the “hobby-room audience” (picture to the right).

We would greatly appreciate your ideas on how to make this particular secret room a little bit magical for the children, so don’t be shy to leave a comment.