A video of a man uncovering a “hidden secret” in a 130-year-old home in Kentucky has gone viral on YouTube.
The “secret” space was captured in a video posted by YouTuber Sam Heine (@samheinerealestate), who is a 32-year-old realtor at Family Realty in Louisville, Kentucky’s most populous city, where he also lives, Heine told Newsweek.
The video, titled “This 130 year old house in Clifton has a hidden secret behind one of it’s walls,” has amassed 374,000 views since it was shared on April 11. The clip sees Heine point out a narrow space outside one of the walls of the home where there used to be a “sleeping porch.”
“Believe it or not, that used to be something called an outdoor sleeping porch that was completely open to the exterior of the home,” he says in the video. “But clearly at some point someone enclosed it to add that space into the interior square footage of the home.”
The viral clip comes as the median spending on home renovations in the United States was reported to have surged by 60 percent in recent years between 2020 and 2023, jumping from $15,000 to $24,000, according to a 2024 report by Houzz, a home design website.
@samheinerealestate on YouTube
‘Interesting Brick Window and Door Frames’
Heine, who loves “history, nostalgia and before/after stories,” told Newsweek that he came across this home in Clifton, one of the more “up and coming” neighborhoods in the city, in a listing where the home is currently for sale.
“I was walking through it and noticed the interesting brick window and door frames in the hallway. There was no mention of those details in the listing, but I spoke to a prior owner of the house, and he confirmed,” Heine said.
He explained: “Typically, when you see window frames and doorways like that inside of a home, you can assume that area was once part of the outside of the home. You see it relatively often toward the back of the house, as people enclose old back porches or build onto the back to enlarge a kitchen. It’s less common to find an enclosed sleeping porch.”
According to the realtor, these side sleeping porches were a staple among southern homes from that era. “They gave folks a breezy, shaded place to rest during the heat of the day with these narrow gaps between houses, funneling air through to naturally cool the porch and room surrounding it,” he explained.
The design of a typical sleeping porch features “two windows and a center door opening from the middle wall plus those two side doors on either end, giving porch access to all three main parts of the home,” he notes in the video. “Back then, it was all about air flow, keeping each section of the house cooler during the summer.”
This Clifton home was renovated to enclose the porch at some point in the last 30 years or so, although the exact date is unknown, Heine told Newsweek.
Noting that the Clifton neighborhood was “pretty rough” around the 1980s through the early 2000s, he said, “it’s possible that it was enclosed as a safety measure.”
Sleeping porches, which were popular in the Victorian era, were designed to help keep houses cool. While their usage became less prevalent with the arrival of central air conditioning in the modern age, some homes still feature them, as Heine showcased in a couple of other homes featured in the YouTube clip.
“There are some really beautiful examples throughout the deeper South, particularly New Orleans,” Heine said, adding that “you can find examples of sleeping porches all over the country.”
States with a warmer, more humid climate are where you’ll find the highest concentrations of them, he said, noting that “it was a necessity to make homes bearable during the hot/swampy months of the year.”
In addition to helping to cool homes, “they also are beautiful and make for excellent outdoor space,” Heine noted, adding, “I wish we saw more of that style of home today.”
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