Tim Dowling: I found a secret loft in our house. Foolishly, I also told my wife about it …

Our house contains a secret mystery room I didn’t even know was there until almost a year after we moved in. One day I was sitting alone in the garden looking up at the little round window near the peak of the back roof, when it occurred to me that I had never seen the view out of that window.

I went into the house and up the stairs, only to discover that the window didn’t exist from the inside. I made the trip to the garden and back a few times, the final time leading my wife outside by the wrist.

“What room does that window look out from?” I said, pointing up.

“Huh,” she said. “I’ve never noticed that window.”

After a while it became clear – sort of – that the window belonged to a little loft above the oldest one’s bedroom, although there was no access to it: the ceiling of the bedroom below is completely plastered over.

Sometimes I reflect on what might be up there – some gold bars perhaps, or a colony of protected bats. But I mostly don’t think about it because it gives me the creeps. The mystery of the secret room hadn’t crossed my mind in at least a year, until my wife started making plans.

“I’m going to have a big cupboard here,” she says, spreading her arms along a section of kitchen wall.

“There’s already a cupboard there,” I say. “Aren’t we looking right at it?”

“That’s freestanding,” she says. “I want built-in, and all the way along.”

“Won’t it block the door?” I say.

“Halfway then,” she says.

“Won’t that look weird?” I say.

“I knew you’d be like this,” she says.

“I’m just worried it will make the space seem smaller,” I say.

“We have no storage!” she shouts. “No place to put anything! What do you suggest?”

“I suggest we throw away half our stuff,” I say.

“Or we could just throw away all your stuff,” she says.

“If it prevents this cupboard, I will consider it,” I say.

A lot of my wife’s improvement proposals are predicated on the fond hope that our children will finally leave home in 2023. This is why the sudden need for extra kitchen storage perplexes me.

“Seriously,” I say. “When they’re gone we’ll only need, like, a frying pan and two forks. We can share a mug.”

“You understand nothing,” she says.

My wife’s plans also include moving us into the oldest one’s former bedroom, which was instantly colonised by the middle one when the oldest one moved out, and will probably be commandeered by the youngest one eventually.

“But if they both go this year, we should probably be in there,” my wife says. “It’s the biggest room.”

“It could be even bigger,” I say. “Don’t forget about the mystery room above it.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” my wife says. Little lights go on behind her eyes, and I realise I have inadvertently rekindled her lust for additional storage space once more.

I am sitting in my office shed when I suddenly notice something: our neighbour’s rear extension has an identical round window in the same spot.

Two days later my wife returns from next door with a load of pictures on her phone, of a dimly lit space filled with junk.

“She’s got folding stairs going up there, and you can just about stand up in the middle,” she says.

“Does it have a floor?” I say. My wife stops scrolling through the photos to stare at me.

“Of course it has a fucking floor,” she says.

“I mean, did she have to put a floor in, or was there already one?”

“Oh,” my wife says. “I didn’t ask.”

“Because we don’t really know what we’ll find until we get up there,” I say, thinking about the possibilities: a mummified cat; a skeleton in an Edwardian wedding dress.

“She said the folding stairs were expensive, but you shouldn’t skimp.”

The next day I find myself browsing through high-end folding loft ladders, wondering how much we’re going to end up spending, or how many evil spirits we’re going to unleash, in order to have somewhere to keep our Christmas lights.

Then I think: this is all your fault, because you saw that little round window, and you couldn’t leave well enough alone.