I am sorry that my house doesn't have an attic; not nearly as sorry as I am that it doesn't have a front porch, but sorry.  Attics have ambience, even those that offer nothing more than a collection of cobwebs and a cardboard box of old shoes.   Attics are places where mysteries sometimes unfold and we respect and revere them because of that.  We are always expecting to find that authentic Van Gogh tossed in the far corner years and years ago by a previous home owner who didn't know its worth and never liked its color palette or the trunk with the secret compartment full of loose diamonds left by the same addled former owner who didn't know the compartment existed.  That's the stuff of attics.   

The house I grew up in had an attic.  It was closed off by a door in the bedroom hallway.  When you opened the door there was a nicely finished staircase that led to the attic.  What I remember well is the stacks of magazines that would be piled on the edge of the stairs:  Life, National Geographic and maybe one other?  That was my mother's work.  She rarely went into the attic.  The attic was for my dad.  (As an adult I realize that my mother never went into the attic because she was deathly afraid of mice and I'm sure that she conjured up an attic full of the scampering creatures just waiting to pop out at her when she reached the top step; after all she had read Cinderella.) 

The finished stairs is where the "finished" ended for there was no floor in the attic. There were pieces of plywood laid over the ceiling beams and it was on those bases that the attic stash was placed.  We were never allowed into the attic because my parents were sure that we would step off a beam onto the ceiling and come crashing through landing in the middle of the kitchen table and cracking our heads open. 

When our parents were not around and we knew we could get away with it, my brother and I would creep up those stairs and spend as much time as we dared looking at the attic haul, craning our necks to see around the front objects to the back objects.  There wasn't anything interesting and I know that we were both disappointed about that.  I am not sure what we hoped would be there but something mysterious for sure, certainly something far more interesting than stacks of Life magazines and a wooden file cabinet filled with cancelled checks.   

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It is exactly this sort of thing  that keeps us poking around in attics: (www.wrensnestonline.com/blog/2007/03/ is the source of the picture and article.) 

"I found this picture while rummaging through our attic upstairs.

It’s Walt Disney, seated on the left, with some of the cast of Song of the South. His signature is faded, but you can see it in blue in the bottom left.

The film was released at the Fox Theatre in 1946, and the Wren’s Nest hosted a few press conferences for the event.

Seriously, you could spend weeks in our attic and still find stuff like this. Most of the memorabilia has to do with obscure family members and descendents of Joel Chandler Harris. But every once in a while you’ll find something neat."
 
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Of course, if you find nothing of worth in your attic, you can always turn it into a cozy and charming bedroom with sitting room, like this -

Stairs to the attic

Sitting Room

Bedroom from one angle

Bedroom from another angle

Talk about beckoning.... 

No, no, you take the downstairs bedroom and I will manage with the attic one.  I insist.