A Secret Between the Walls

A mere year and two days ago, my wife and I purchased an old home in an even older New England town. While the exact date of the house isn't known, my neighbor informs me that he's seen etchings from the 1860s depicting my house. As with many old homes, ours has - as the house inspector euphemisiticly put it - much "defered maintainence".

So it came to be that my step-father and I were sawing a hole in the living room wall to install an electrical outlet. My goal was to move the TV against the wall abuting the bathroom to get it out of the breezeway leading to the stairs. As I said: much defered maintainence, old house - there weren't enough outlets to have appliances placed where they were convenient.

As we sawed out the block for the outlet and knocked it back into the hole, we took a peer in to figure out what the conditions were like for running a cable. Looking into the inky blackness, I couldn't help but remark, "Wow, that other wall seems awefully far back." Dave agreed that, yes indeed, it seemed like an unusually large setback. far enough that we couldn't reach an arm back to touch the distant wall.

It's at that point we realized that my house has a secret room.

Measuring an estimated eight feet long, by ten feet high, by slightly less than two feet deep, it's an intriguing space: too large to be a mere void or utility space, yet a bit wide and shallow for a closet. And there are NO entrances to the space.

The more I ponder the space, the more mysterious it is to me. Surely when the house was built in the mid 1800s, the sensibilities of the day dictated not wasting space with a pointless void - the original house without the more contemporary add-on kitchen and laundry room had very little space to start with. At some point, someone had to have knowingly - and presumably, purposefully - sealed that space off. Yet it begs the question: why?

At the end of the day, Dave and I did the only thing we had time for: we finsihed the outlet and cleaned up the mess. Yet...yet...I have this beckoning mystery, this untapped potential. After all: what would YOU do if you discovered you had a significant amount of usable space materialize, as if out of nowhere? It's not every day that one finds a secret room.

There's no doubt that I'm going to have to tap into that area and convert it into something. I'll be posting more about it as I get further along with it.