I have a small crawl-space that is accessible from my garage. It's the 'space underneath the stairs' in the house. It's probably 3 feet by 6 feet long or so. I've built a real nice, solid 'work bench'/shelves thing in the garage that will cover the opening. I've been thinking of all sorts of things I could do to still allow access; but I'm kind of wondering 'why'. As far as I know, there isn't any reason to go in there - no sump pump or anything like that. I'm thinking I could just drywall over it and sacrifice the storage space - but it feels 'wrong' to me. Is there something I should know before I do this? Will this be a potential problem if/when I go to sell my house?

Hello, I'm new here, and I hope I'm posting this to the right section. If not, maybe someone could kindly point me to the right forum. Here's our problem: We recently noticed three large gray shadows in our ceiling; one in the living room and two in one of our bedrooms. All are not the typical circular shape you see from a roof leak dripping. Rather, these are more like "blob" shaped, and all are on the ceiling close to where it meets the wall; all are also at the "front" -- as in, facing the front of our house along the guttering side. We had a new roof put on in the summer of 2009, and have had no problems. In the past few weeks we've had the roofing company come out twice and check for any signs of water getting in and they swear the roof is not leaking. However, they would not go into the attic and pull up the insulation directly above the location of these three "shadows" to check for us; they only did thorough exterior checks. They gave a couple of guesses as to exactly what is causing this: 1) The previous home owners had painted over these shadows and now they are bleeding through. We have lived there for 5 years and I find this hard to believe. 2) The gutters became so full of rain during heavy downpours that the water couldn't drain out fast enough and actually spilled "backwards" into the house to the point that it reached the attic and caused the moisture "shadows" in our ceiling. Now I have heard of "ice dams" forming in gutters during the winter months during the cold temps and similar things happening as a result, but I've never heard of gutters overflowing back into the house in the summer/fall months. I am just looking for opinions from people who have had experience with the same or similar issues as this, and trying to find out if it's not from a leaky roof, what could be the source/cause of these "shadows"? My husband and I are not experienced in home improvement or repair in any way, and we've never had any home-owner problems to deal with before.