I have what I refer to as a "crawlspace" attic. That is, it's above the main floor, and it has a floor [mostly] and it sure is used for storage. But the rafters are so low that if you don't want bumps on your noggin, you must stoop almost chin to knee to progress from one end to the other.

Storage: holiday ornaments; dresses I will never wear again but which might become quilts; DH's old military uniforms and a wooden box which holds his childhood baseballs and marbles and stuff. Well, not the marbles anymore, GS asked for them. And (no doubt I shouldn't admit to this) boxes and boxes and boxes of books; light reading that has been read once or twice and now awaits my retirement to be re-read. I have to think about what else is up there... suitcases; tray tables found to be too small; boxes of empty canning jars near the steps because they do get used; some iron cookware I gave up after the third time my wrist broke; the scraps from the bath carpet [which always seem to be good for other uses]; a collection of boxed games and puzzles; a wicker elephant masquerading as a side table; several boxes with seed-starting stuff [trays and lights, etc]; an area which has the storm windows in summer and screens in winter. Nothing special --- although those baseballs no doubt are antiques; just the usual detritus of a busy life in a small house.

g, there were still attics being built right after WWII, at least our house in GA had one. It had closets with hanging rods and deep shelves built along the sides the full length of house.

At one end there was a huge exhaust fan...must have been six feet across...never ran it of course while we were in attic....probably would have sucked us right out the vent. LOL It was used to cool the attic but also the whole house. You kept windows barely cracked 4-5 inches and that fan kept a strong draught coming thru house on summer nights. Then very early morning we cut off fan and closed windows and drapes and it was just bearable heatwise until evening when the fan was used again.

That attic was crammed full until sometime in the 1960's when my Mom insisted that we two married daughters, one married son, decide what we wanted to take and store ourselves ...everything else was going to Goodwill. It was an all-weekend affair...lots of laughs and trading...but we kept very few items.

In our own house bought in 1968 there was an attic but we had to floor it and I made a rule that anything that went up there had to be dustproof and airtight, adequately marked and listed on chart kept handy in laundry room. You know how long that system lasted...lol When we moved out thirty-some years later it wasn't too bad but then we only had one son. His junk was mostly spare car/bicycle parts which filled our garage storage space...LOL

No attic here...but when we "downsized" we had a great clearing out. I'm still in process though of clearing bookshelves...don't think that ever ends.

There are dozens of those storage facilities for rent around here...I suppose they take the place of the old attics. I'd suppose it migh cut down on saving stuff if you have to pay for storage..but I wonder? josh

Meldy, DH still gripes about my tossing his old Army dress uniform...gee, he was just one of those college ROTC guys and got out soon as possible...I did let him keep a huge waterproof canvas 3/4 length coat that came in handy about 6 times over the years when it snowed 3 inches here. LOL

And I'm in the midst of re-reading my old books one last time and letting them go. Especially right now old mysteries...but Janet Flanner and S.J.Perelman too. Some of them I've had 30 years or more. josh

A person can literally stand in the very middle of our attic; it's a 1942 Southern home. Almost. It's a true attic in every sense of the word. We'd love to add a thicker plywood "floor" to it to add storage. And probably will. Right now it's just in plastic bags and tossed up there! I can't imagine what will come out of there when we move in the next couple of years. We had to scale down from 1100sq ft to 832sq ft. There are things up there we still use, and I miss them greatly, such as beach towels! I am just having to do without. I don't want to pare down any more than I already have. I like being at least somewhat comfortable. Smaller footprint or not, I want my beach towel, and other toys. I don't have to have everything in the whole world, but what I did buy, I like, and use regularly. :(

i know our attic held my first wedding gown....wonder what ever happened to that??!
golly, i remember all my brothers service uniforms and stuff were up there too. forgot about those till i read your response, josh. each boy had his own seperate container with their personal stuff in it.. i always used to try to sneak up there and look in them. always got in trouble too....what could be so private about a bunch of old clothes?
i guess what we used as an 'attic' was a bona fide third floor, because we had regular flooring up there.mom even had a carpet on the 'bedroom' side of the attic.
we didnt have a fan up there like some of you did. i can remember my mother opening that door on a hot summer night to cool the house off, tho. she would turn the lights off but still the place got full of moths and other night creatures including bats......maybe attics werent that great......
g

We have this space above the garage and have those stairs that fold out and down..........When I moved back in here I went up those stairs one day and found there are all kinds of boxes up there and I have no idea what is in them! Now I need someone to get them down for me and go through them...........might be an adventure might not....

We've got the garage attic with the pull-down stairs too. Like Robin says we need to ad some more plywood "floor" to it to add to it's storage capacity. Currently we keep all the seasonal decorations up there. However, we have to be careful to remember not to put anything like candles up there as in the summer it heats up to about a zillion degrees.

What I would kill for is a basement, but they are pretty much non-existent down here.

We had a wonderful attic at the lakehouse.
There was a pull down stairs and once you got up there,
man oh man what storage.
Here at this house the attic was finished and a bathroom added so there is one big long room, large enough for an
apartment if we wanted to spend the money.

The furnaces are in the attic on the back side of the house
and on the front, we have some plywood down so we can store some building materials. If I have my way about it there will be more plywood so I can empty out those 3 storage
buildings I filled up with what was left over after I gave away furniture, tools, gardening stuff.

I had a garden shed at the lakehouse and a garage.
I have neither of those things here and I miss them more than I can say.

About storage buildings. Once you've moved all your stuff into them, you are reluctant to get into that mess again
and are pretty much willing to keep paying so as not to have
to deal with it.

I'd almost kill for a garden shed and another garage.
The birds crap on my car all the time. On the other hand,
I never have trouble finding my car in a parking lot.;0)

My attic held some pictures of family, Neil mother & dad's
graduation certificates that were BIG and quite colorful.
His brother's art from years gone by. His old Navy trunk.
an antique organ stool, an antique rocker, boxes and boxes of old papers and tons of books. It was pretty amazing, the stuff I had to go through before I moved.

When we moved in this house 20+ years ago, we stored a lot of stuff up there...never to be brought down again.

Mr. Man keeps saying he's going to take everything out and trash it but I know there are treasures there that I couldn't live without.

LOL, wanda. i have treasures i cant live w/o too. these are the boxes i put away when we moved here 18 years ago and have never looked in since.
it is true that no matter how much storage room one has, it will get filled up. maybe that is one reason the attics went 'bye-bye'. keeping all that junk is great for two generations later, but who wants to deal with it now?
g

g,

I have a HUGE storage building.
Hurricane Katrina blew most of the roof off; but, because of damage to house, and other more pressing repairs, we just got around to totally removing and replacing the roof on this building.

We had to take EVERYTHING out...treasures of the 20+ years accummulated since we moved into this house...seasonal decorations, gardening supplies, pool supplies, outgrown clothing waiting to pass on to grands, extra parrot/bird cages, etc., etc., etc.
It has taken WEEKS to go through this stuff, weed out, put in storage containers, label, before I put it back in the building.
I am honestly weeding some of it out.

As I was filling the building back up with things I couldn't live without, my 12-year-old said, "Who is going to have to go through all this junk when you die, Mom? It sure ain't gonna be me." LOLOL

Most houses have attics of some sort, even if they're only accessible through a little trap door. Our old house has one of those and NO I have not ever been up there. I don't know if I could shinny through the tiny hole to get there, but our roofers did, and they were larger than me. LOL.

I have lived in homes with the little pull down ladders, but have lived in several where the attic was a really nice finished off floor, with a staircase, always located behind a door, never open like the other stair cases. In one house, my parents made the second floor into a suite for my sis and her husband to help them out financially. The attic was completely finished off and the size of the whole house, so it was a MAMMOTH bedroom for them when they took the third floor.

Another house we had, had most of the third floor finished. There was even still a gas light on the wall, and two rooms. The rest was closed off. I begged my Mama to let me move my bedroom to the one room with the dormer windows, but she nixed it. LOL. That house was haunted, anyways, so maybe I'm glad I didn't. LOLOL.

I've also looked at a couple old properties where the third floor was finished off as a ballroom. A cousin of mine eventually bought it and turned it into a dance studio.

It's nowhere near ballroom size, but we have a pretty big attic with its own set of stairs leading up to it (we also have front and rear staircases between the first and second stories). The house was built in about 1890, and that doesn't seem to be that uncommon in houses of that age. The ceilings are plenty high throughout. A lot of people in the neighborhood have turned their attics into third-floor suites, entertainment areas and the like, but we just have the usual assortment of packrat stuff in a big, raw space. The cats dart up there the minute we open the door to the stairs.

In the attic, there is a small window that one can crawl through and stand on a portion of flat roof below. Until we had to replace the roof a couple of years ago, there was a little deck on that flat roof, right below the window. We were told previous owners liked to sunbathe nude upon it.

that is sad what katrina did, wanda. some many lost so much. i hope you didnt lose any treasures.LOL, what your son said.
omg! i forgot about the door, too susy. yes our attic had a door and it was always closed. that's why it was always so cold up there. at that time we didnt have oil heat or any modern heat pump. we heated our house with a big old coal stove in the cellar and there was one big grate where the heat came out in the middle of the dinning room , right near the stairway going to the second floor. you should have gone up there susy, who knows what treasure were up there from looong ago.
i wonder why newer houses dont have two stairs too, dirtdiver. certainly is a good fire precaution. i remember when i was about 12 my best friends house had two stairs and the front stairs were in a hall way off the livingroom thinking back, that was such a neat house. you went in the front door to a foyer you could go left into the living room, then dining room then kitchen, or you could go straight , down a narrow hall which had the front stairs in it and a big understairs closet- which i was afraid of, haunted too!- and the hall led to the dining room. upstairs where what seemed like a bazzillion bedrooms. i think i ventured up to the 'attic' in that house one time but we were yelled at and i never got to see what was there. just remember it as sort of biiiig, open and scarey. that house had a porch off the second floor bedroom too. we used to sleep there in the summer.
g

I love the old huge houses to visit but I'd hate to try and keep one clean. Weren't those finished attics/ third floors often for indoor servants, and the "back stairs" for their use for carrying coal or hot water I suppose...or breakfast trays...LOL

Suzy, I'd want to enlarge that entry and explore that attic too. Do you ever catch the tv show "If these Walls Could Talk"...fascinating old ledgers and artifacts tucked away and forgotten in old houses.

Cats need nine lives...they always flew up our pull-down stairs to attic too. And then hid in amongst boxes or in dark corners and of course never came when called. Curses! Same with our part=basement. It held furnace/ac unit and water heater plus had a little storage space. We kept door padlocked to prevent curious kids maybe getting in..always had nightmares about repairmen not noticing cats sneaking in when working down there then locking a cat in. josh

Our old house in St. Louis had three full floors (the third floor originally for the servants & had a trunk room. And had a front & back stairs. The back stairs usually were useful for direct access to the kitchen. You'd think more houses would have them.

And yes, cats love those pull down stairs. Whenever we go up into the garage attic we have to do a cat patrol before we put the stairs back up because there is invariably a cat lurking up there among the boxes.

The house we have now had front and back stairs at one time, but somebody before us took the kitchen stairs out. I don't think it was for the same reason Victorian houses had two sets, however. I think this house was built in two stages. The house is brick, built on an ell. Both sections are two over two, typically Federal. One ell of the house has hand hewn beams, and the older section with the cellar has beams made of logs. You look at the walls to gauge what might once have been exterior, because all the walls, inside and out are three course brick. My interior walls are eighteen inches deep and solid. (An electrician's nightmare) and wired much like they did with old houses in Europe, with conduit.

No, I do not want to explore the attic. When we had our old roof removed, the roofer said we had a bat colony up there. I made him promise to make sure all the little creatures were out of there, before he closed the roof up.

wow, i never knew that about the back stairs being for the servants.
so way back when, my freinds house might have been the home of some hoty toty rich folks who had servants running up and down the stairs at all hours of the night keeping the fires burning to warm the house........this is sooo fascinating..
g

Back when most houses with back stairs were built you didn't have to be super rich to have servants. Before WWII a live-in servant maybe made something like $20.00/month!