Buried treasure

So… I’m in the process of remodeling and moving in to a new house.  This week I had a guy in there running ductwork for a bunch of ventilation fans.  He gave me a call a few hours in to the job with a very strange request.

The house has a finished attic, with a bunch of knotty-pine paneling.  In one of the knee walls  is a little hatch with a storage cubby behind it:

He pulled down a panel in the back of the cubby, in order to run a duct through the attic space behind the walls, and was immediately greeted with this view:

Lots of stuff hidden in the walls of my attic!  Some of the items back there appeared to be bigger than the hatch itself, and he didn’t want to mess with hauling it out.  So, I spent yesterday morning creeping around on my knees, shoving, rolling, and dragging various bits of debris out from behind my walls.  Here is some of it.

Total haul:  Two big color TVs, four 15″ CRT monitors, one microwave oven, three five-gallon cans of varnish, a printer, a scanner, countless cans of paint.  This doesn’t count the stuff I left in there:  Another CRT, a tower PC, and a dozen or so old tires.

It was the tires that really broke the HVAC guy.  He just kept repeating, Tires!  Why would they haul tires all the way to the attic when there’s a garage? Tires!

Of course, I’ve only explored about one fifth of the hidden attic space.  I shudder to think what else is up there.