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PrintA HOUSE FULL OF TREASURES
This family’s home hides plenty of secrets, too
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHLEEN HANSON AND MEGHAN HANSON POWERS
When I was in junior high school, one of my favorite books was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. But it was not the beautiful witch, or even the great lion, that fascinated me most.
It was the wardrobe.
I was enthralled by the idea that a regular piece of furniture might have magical properties, that a house might have within its walls a hidden passage to another world. I imagined where I might find myself were I to come upon a tiny doorway inside our bathroom cabinet, on the other side of the drainpipe. I fantasized that I might discover a seam on the concrete wall at the back of the small cellar we had, behind where we stacked our skis.
Apparently I never let go of those daydreams, and nearly four decades later, when my husband and I finally had the opportunity to build a family home from the ground up, I started thinking right away how we could incorporate a magic wardrobe of our own. As it’s turned out, we have several.
We learned, after our site plans were drawn, that the basement of our new home in Alta, Wyoming, was at the same elevation as the first floor of the horse barn: a situation that in my mind cried out for an underground tunnel connecting the two. And an underground tunnel, naturally, provides an opportunity for secret doors.
If you want to enter the tunnel from our basement, of course I can’t disclose how that’s done. But it involves a pair of iron candlesticks on the pantry shelf next to a round box of oatmeal and a bottle of vegetable oil. And certainly, I wouldn’t divulge in this magazine article how one enters the tunnel from the first floor of the horse barn. But if you see a purple halter rope hanging on a horseshoe hook on the wall by the stairs to the hayloft, don’t yank on it.
Our laundry room occupies an attic space over the dining room, and when they framed in the walls under the sloped ceiling, there was an intriguing, triangular space left under the eaves. A space just big enough, if enclosed, to accommodate a dwarfish door, and on the inside a tiny chair and lamp to illuminate the pages of your book. Fortunately we were able to create two of these cunning little hidey-holes; a quantity which corresponds to the number of children we have.
We also have a safe that is … somewhere in the house. You could search our house upstairs and downstairs for days. For weeks. You’d never find it. In fact I’ll give you the combination right now: 32-11-70. Because I know you’d never find the safe. Even though it’s in plain sight—actually at eye level—it’s so thoroughly disguised that it’s essentially invisible.
We were lucky to have a builder who not only aided us willingly in the quest to add mysterious features to our house, but had an affinity of his own for secret schemes.
About a month before we moved in, he revealed the fact that he’d hidden quarters from all fifty states at various places throughout the house. But there are quite a few more than fifty, because he’d used a number of extras from his favorite states of Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
He’d used a drill bit the exact diameter of a quarter and, as we’re still discovering, he was ingenious at finding places to (permanently) embed the coins. The bottom of a bathroom drawer. The inside of a door jamb about a foot off the ground. Even, we found several months after moving in, on the underside of a table, which surprised me, because it meant he’d been sneaking quarters in under our noses, even after we’d moved our own stuff in.
The nerve of that man! I’ll always love him.
I realize these shenanigans add nothing to the resale value of our home. For all I know, they might even take away. Then again, we didn’t build this house with anyone in mind but ourselves, and we hope to do more than simply occupy the place. We’d like to live in it and love it forever. Even if you’re not building from scratch, though, I think there must be something to that notion. That your house is, ideally, yours only.
But I’m sure you’ve gathered that the secrets in our house aren’t really very secret. I admit, they’re usually the first things we show people! So come on out and see for yourself. I’ve buried a map at the base of the third telephone pole on the left, coming from town.
