This is one of our more favoriter spots in the house. Here’s Abby in our reading loft, which sits above the little girls’ room where she, Natalie, and Sarah sleep.

On the left you can see the ladder that leads up to it. Four 4-inch lag bolts hold each rung directly to the studs, and each rung is topped with sandpapery stair-grip material, so that when kids scramble up and down–which they do a dozen times a day–nobody slips and falls. Of course it helps that we pray for safety every day. No broken necks yet!

That ladder was a stroke of collaborative genius. I was trying to figure out how to design access to the loft without taking up floor space, and every ladder design stuck out at least two feet into the room. Since I designed our house based loosely on the principles of The Not-So-Big House, I don’t want a single square inch wasted–not to mention the injuries such a ladder would inflict upon children, which since the days of Adam have never learned to look where they are going. While in conversation about the problem with some folks at work, we came up with the idea of a ladder that goes right up the wall. It protrudes about three inches, less than a wreath or shadowbox, and it works just fine.

Here Abby demonstrates scale. At the top of the ladder you see the gate to the loft, which hinges inward and has a self-closing hinge on it. When kids go in the door closes behind them like a valve, preventing accidental falls.

Through the back wall of the loft extends a long, narrow storage space above the stairwell, wherein fit our camping supplies, winter clothing, and Christmas decorations. There are a few boxes of clothes, but one advantage of having six daughters ages 13, 12, 10, 7, 4, and 2 is that the older ones can store their old clothes on the younger.