Zigzag Attic Hatchway

Once again this came to me in a dream and initially I thought it was a rubbish idea but I have now changed my mind.

As it stands, attics are accessed via a hatchway and ladder. This is both a potential hazard and a waste of space. It's a hazard because someone could fall or drop something through the hole. Its a waste of space because there is a way of utilising the entry in a more convenient and accessible manner for storage.

In my dream, the hatchway to the attic is lined with shelves, which could be closed using lockable sliding or conventional doors. Small objects which are not needed or wanted often enough to justify keeping them in the main rooms of the house but required or desired more frequently than usual attic storage could be kept in these shelves. It would be relatively easy to access these objects simply by opening the hatch and unfolding the ladder.

Further into the attic is a kind of passage along which one crawls, lined again with cupboards, shelves, drawers and the like, perhaps labelled, containing other such objects.

Finally, there is a second open hatchway into the main part of the attic which again contains storage facilities.

This reduces the height of the main attic, thereby easing access to higher parts of the roof space and utilising the otherwise wasted floor space.

It also makes it impossible to fall out of the attic or drop things.

This idea can be extended to the main part of the house thus, though I kind of regard this as a separate idea: if the doors are similarly staggered horizontally in the other rooms, similar storage space is provided along the hallways between the rooms. This would enable the rest of the house to be neater and more minimalist. Having said that, I accept that this would also take up a lot of room and would probably be counterproductive.