It’s one of the classic horror scenarios.

You wake up in the middle of the night. You hear a noise. Someone, something is scratching and agitating at the ceiling.

That something is in your loft.

“Relax” mutters your slightly irritated partner. “It’s just a little mouse or something.”

‘Little mouse’ or not, you know it’s there. And it wants to get you! Because nothing appeals to the grim, grisly and irrevocably evil things in life (or death) than a big, dark and unconverted loft.

Just ask Mr and Mrs Homer Simpson, a typical American family from Springfield.

They’d neglected the loft in their four bedroomed detached home ever since they bought it. And with good reason as they found it to be the perfect place to hide away their oldest siblings twin brother, Hugo who’d been securely locked away in their loft for over a decade.

Yet even the most sumptuously converted loft can turn all of your dreams into nightmares.

Imagine having a secret, a secret and a secret place that only you knew about, one where you could turn all of your desires into reality. And by that, I don’t mean the model railway of your dreams up in your loft space.

That’s so twentieth century.

No, I’m talking about a smart, luxurious and discreet place where you can meet special friends and have some...special times. Look, you know where I’m going here, we’re all adults on this blog.

But what if it all went terribly, terribly wrong?

A salutary warning, perhaps, to never-ever p**s off the builders working on your project. Especially if they insist on communicating in Latin.

Not that I want to frighten you or anything. But all sorts of terrible things can happen in the loft.

There are You Tube films about haunted lofts whilst in horror maestro James Herberts book The Magic Cottage there are bats in the loft. Hundreds of them. And they’re not very nice.

People have even posted reviews on Trip Advisor warning fellow holiday makers not to stay at a certain hotel because they think the loft room is haunted whilst the internet is positively infested with photographs that claim to be of ghosts in lofts.

You wouldn’t, in short, be blamed for thinking that, on the whole, the average loft was potentially quite a scary place.

And you could be right.

But not as scary as the fact that, for as long as you have the space and potential above your head in your current property to turn something that looks like this....into something more like this yet do absolutely nothing about it, you’re not only wasting valuable space in the process but also the opportunity to increase the value of your home whilst you’re at it.

That isn’t just scary, its positively frightening!

So what are you waiting for? Start exorcising that empty space above all your heads today-and make sure that if anything goes bump in the night it’s one of yours.

Not one of these.