The Dark Place.

January 2012

This post should probably be titled 'I am going in!' a la swat team movie. In our master bedroom we have access to both of the eaves space in the house.  By access I mean, on one side of the room we don't have a wall separating us from it.  On the other side of the room we have a creepy half broken sliding door.  The sliding door side has shag carpeting.  Gross green, matted old stinky shag carpeting.  Considering the fact that the past owner had a cat, who was not so good at litter boxes, I could only imagine what was back there.  For that reason I waited a year and half to actually enter the space.

By enter, I mean I put on a tyvex suit, safety glasses, gloves and a head lamp.  I honestly had no idea what was back there, there was no light. Best case scenerio it was old and stinky and maybe had some old bugs.  Worst case scenerio, dead body.  The fact that I slept only about 10 feet from this space is actually pretty amazing.  For the record, I did put furniture in front of the opening to protect myself from any real zombie moments.

Josh and I felt we didn't really need access to the eaves on this side of the house.  We had plenty of storage on the one side and we honestly needed the wall space in the bedroom for our furniture.  We bought a 24" x 24" access panel so that if there was ever an emergency we could still get in there but otherwise would never use it.

But back to the removal. Fully suited up I made a great sight!  Josh documented and after a deep breath I crawled in.  Nothing big to report actually, it was hot, and stinky and pretty dusty.  I used an exacto knife to cut the carpet into ribbons and then put them in trash bags.  It was sweaty work in there and my high level of protective clothing was not breathing. After I removed the carpet I shop vac'ed the whole room and then wipe the space down with clorox.  Phew, house demons banished!  The next week we framed in the slider, installed the access hatch and drywalled the remainder up.  Our house got a little less creepy.