This weekend the Ginja Ninja and I were over at the Little House, which I had been using as an office, and we are now renovating for her to live in. The deal is that she had to get her driver's licence and a car before she moved out, and we're very close to those goals... But we have been working on renovating the Little House for months, on odd moments of time. This weekend we wanted to tackle some big remaining tasks as she's on track to move in the day after Christmas. I was going to try and find the attic access, one more time, and get up on the roof to clean off branches, paint the upper corner in the kitchen (inaccessible when standing on the floor) and put up the ceiling in the bathroom. We succeeded in the latter three.
That first conundrum, though. So, background on this house. The First Reader bought it when he was newly single before he and I were an item, and he didn't have a lot after his last relationship squeezed him dry. Not just financially, but emotionally. So he bought this tiny house that had been abandoned for several years, and he got it dirt cheap. The house was built, we think, around 1920. Makes it a hundred years old, now. But the last time it was renovated was approximately 1970 and even though I want to say that's only thirty years ago, it's actually fifty. Green shag carpet and nasty linoleum to prove it. It's a one-bedroom house, with a generously sized living room, small kitchen, little bedroom, and positively microscopic bathroom. I got real measurements on that while we were prepping to put up a ceiling in it - it's 64" from door to far wall with the window. And only 4'6" across at the top where I was putting in showerboard for ceiling. I can stand in it, span my arms, and touch both walls.
Having set the scene... when I moved in with the First Reader, I was a broke college student, and he was still recovering from stuff that came before me. Both of us grew up country, and have lived in houses of dubious repair in the past, so while it certainly wasn't ideal, once we'd installed the kitchen sink I was perfectly happy using it as home base to finish college and curl up with my beloved in our little nest. We had plans to fix it up, but about the time I graduated from school, we got the kids back, and he found a great job, we had to move out because no room at all for the whole family. When we moved out, we made arrangements to let someone live there. It's not a neighborhood you want a house to stand empty in... and we are pretty sure that selling a one-bedroom house is just about going to be impossible without a lot of work done on the house that we won't get the money back for if we do it. The friend staying there passed away, her son trashed the house, stole a lot of stuff, and vanished. We were told all of this a month after it happened. So. We have it, what to do with it? When I was working 2 miles away, using it as an office was reasonable. Letting the GN move in to launch her also seemed reasonable.
Having digressed rather a lot, let me return to the ceilings... we wanted to at the very least insulate the house, even while we were living there. But someone, in the distant misty past, had covered over the attic access (and we are assuming there must have been one at some point) with the drop ceiling. Nasty pressed cardboard tiles... and above those, in rooms where we pulled them down looking for the access, is lath-and-plaster. It's not drywall. This stuff is darn near impossible to cut. I don't know that it's the same as the horsehair reinforced plaster I encountered while helping demo a 1740s farmhouse in New England, but it's close.
The attic access was not in any of the obvious places. But one place had something that was different than elsewhere. The tiny hallway ceiling had the same pressed tiles, but under them, there were wide boards. This weekend, convinced that if I could pull those down, I'd finally find a hole... I pulled them down.
Now, this house has a lot of history. We don't know much about it. We know it was taken by the bank in the 2000's and it sat empty for about 8 years, during which scrappers tore the plumbing out of the basement (not not the wiring in the whole house thank goodness). We know from finding a paper tucked under a cabinet drawer that it was owned by a little old lady at one point. We know there have been deaths here, and lives. Whole generations of raccoons in that apocryphal attic, for certain.
It took me some time to pull down the boards. I was standing on the new, very sturdy stepladder and using a small prybar and hammer to get in the cracks. I had to pull a bit of paneling off because the boards were put up before it, and were too long to come down unless it was down. One of the few instances of precise measuring we'd seen in this house. The Ginja Ninja was in the living room trying to teach the Office Floofs (who will now live with her) not to climb curtains.
I pulled down the board, and with it came a shower of black, pill-shaped, empty, clattering... pupal cases. They rained down on the floor below me with a gentle tocsin, pitched the higher and louder for being hollow.
"What was that?"
The GN popped out of the living room, barefooted, wide-eyed and then backpedaled as quickly as she could. "Ew, ew, what did I just step on?"
I bent over the top of the stepladder laughing. "Beetle pupal cases!"
"I don't like them. Don't tell the Jr. Mad Scientist about them, she'll never come over again." The GN made a beeline for her shoes and socks, putting them back on.
"They're long dead and empty." I pointed out. " Just think of them as overly toasted rice krispies."
"Mama!" She wailed. "I like that even less!"
I pulled down another board. There was another flood of pupa. Now, you all know I enjoy our many-legged critters that vastly outnumber humans on God's green earth. I take their portraits, enjoy finding new ones, and don't even mind spiders as long as they stay out of my bathroom and bedroom. But I was with the GN on this one. I didn't like having the tiny ghosts of insectal reproduction all around me, their metamorphosis complete and only the shells remaining. The clatter of their falling was unnervingly loud.
Plus, there was no access hole above the boards. I came down the ladder and crunched through the debris. The GN squeaked and hid in the other room. I swept up the piles of pre-beetle carnal remains, and admitted defeat. The attic was going to remain a mystery a bit longer.