The Door to Nowhere!

One of the many house mysteries when we were looking at the house to purchase was this door way downstairs that seemed to go nowhere. You opened it and it was a stairway up to a ceiling. It took us a while to orient ourselves with where this door would possibly go. Well after being in the house for a time one spring day I decided to open up the back mudroom and empty it out to clean and organize it. In doing this I decided to pull the carpet back because we suspected that this room had only been a open back porch at one time and that the door to nowhere was really the old outside storm door. And low and behold once I pulled the rug back that is exactly what I found a trap door. Which has since proved to be invaluable with all our remodels. The inside downstairs door is the typical old narrow doorway so this trap door has been used countless times to move in the water heater, supplies for the new heating system etc. We are very glad we have it.

Cleaning begins

Well when we moved in it was quite apparent that the house had not been cleaned really well for a while. The owner was an old guy who had very poor vision. So the first priority was to scrub everything really well. In that process I started to realize the big old registers had years worth of treasures hidden in them. My big project for one of the first weekends was to open all the floor registers and clean them out with the shop vac and by hand. Then I put screens in them to prevent any thing we might drop from falling all the way down into the furnace. As you can see by the photos we had quite the bag of trash plus the shop vac full and many treasures we found. Like a million puzzle pieces, a ton of marbles, a little kiddle doll, curlers, bobby pins, paper plates, bags of rodent poison, change, ice cream sandwhich papers, and a ton of dirt. So now at least the air we are breathing is a little cleaner or so we thought. Just wait until we start the replacement of the heating system.

Moving days or should I say weeks arrive

So we don't have any pictures of the weeks of moving we did but we know that we never want to do it again. Thanks to our awesome families we got it done. If it hadn't been for them their help and all their vehicles it would have taken us much longer. We basically started moving in March and finally started staying here in mid April. But that was not the final moving after we sold the North street house we had to do the final moving with all the furniture that we had the house staged with. We were glad to get it all done. The funniest story was from the guys at the church next to the North street house. It was one day after we had carried boxes and furniture etc out for several days at that point and one of the guys said "Where was all that stuff in that little house!" I still am not sure myself. Greg told them I was very organized!