For the background of this blog post, see Let’s Talk About Central Air, dated September 9, 2025, at sharonmarkcohen.com. Maybe instead of discussing central air, we should have concentrated on what was lurking in the crawl space of our well-built brick house. Shall we call it a fortress? You decide.

After 44 years of living with the occasional sounds of squirrels making a home somewhere within our walls and bats in the belfry, we were stunned to find a secret passageway in a third-floor room. Much like one of my favorite childhood television shows, Topper, minus the rotating bookcase, there is a partitioned space in what was used by the previous owners as a third-floor bedroom for one of their sons.

When we moved into our house in 1981, we initially converted that bedroom on the third floor into a study for my husband. While clearing the wood-paneled room for the move-in, we opened the small bedroom door to find a swaying piece of paneling on the bottom portion of the left side of the closet. As it freely swung open when we opened the closet door, a stack of what my parents would have called “girlie magazines” was staring us in the face

With swift action, we scooped the pile up, noticing the dates that indicated they were from the previous owners who lived in the house just ten years, from 1971-1981. We probably wrongly trashed them since others are saying they may have been worth money.

A new discovery came into play after living in what the air conditioning guru calls a well-built house, where we raised our three children. The installer told us that he had to go through the closet in the bedroom/office on the third floor to place some of the pipes. I laughed when telling him about that bundle of magazines we found when we moved in.

He countered, chuckling, while telling me the space is filled with all kinds of stuff, including loads of empty beer bottles. I was stunned. I questioned him about going in there, and he said that after navigating through the entry on the left side of the closet, he could walk in the space standing straight up. The rafters lead to the exterior wall on the third floor.

Upon requesting that the installer empty the contents of the space, he said he would do that after he finished installing the air conditioning unit. The following day, he retracted his offer and said there was so much stuff in there, he couldn’t pull it all out. Instead, he suggested that he could take a picture of it after finishing the installation the following week. I could hardly wait to see what he was speaking about.

I’m waiting for the pictures before lining up our building contractor to pull the contents and decide what to do with them. If a picture paints a thousand words, this should be gargantuan.

Interestingly, my husband has business dealings with one of the women who grew up in our house during the 70s decade with her five siblings. Their father was an ob/gyn. Should my husband bring her the belongings that her brother stashed? Please check back to find what the photos of the contents showed and what we decided to do with the stash.