spring cleaning: basement style

i was a huge bum all winter.  all of my free time was spent snuggling in bed because it was just too cold.

but ever since the weather warmed up, i've been itching with the spring cleaning bug.  some stuff is actual cleaning (like attacking all of the white trim, doors, baseboards, that get dirty so easily) but most of it is organizing.  for being a self proclaimed organized person, my house would have told you i was living a lie.  i'm really good at keeping it picked up so it [for the most part] always looks nice, but the closets, basement, two uninhabited bedrooms, laundry room, etc were all getting neglected and looking like something from an episode of hoarders.  so i'm attacking those neglected areas and giving them some love.  

tonight after my honey got home, he asked the typical question, "what should we do tonight?"  i suggested that we go to the basement and he play hockey with baby girl (he's got a net set up down there) while i work on some organizing and rearranging.  and since i wasn't actually asking him to help (up front at least... he did end up putting in some manpower), he was all for it!  

there's more to it than this but to limit pictures (a rare occasion!), i just posted the ones with the area i focused on tonight.

here are the befores...

 

here is what i got rid of...

and here are the afters...

 

 

 

 

i'm kind of a hoarder and honey is too.  we don't purge.  sooo, my only way to create more space is to play tetris with what i have and amazingly enough, it's like everything disappears and melts away!  really, the only stuff that left the basement was that giant mass of styrofoam packing that came with our tv.  i figured that probably wasn't necessary.  everything else stayed.  

stuff that took up the bottom shelf and the top shelf plus a corner of the floor in a different part of the basement... all neatly categorized and labeled on the top shelf.  it's all just extra paint and trim and tiles and stuff for the house... stuff we're not going to need to access easily or frequently.  

everything that had been in that back corner, i found out, was actually just empty boxes all stacked on top of one another.  i stacked them inside of one another and they all fit neatly (with room to spare) in that giant tv box in the corner.  

the flatened boxes that used to be laying on the shelf are now all stored upright in the bottom right.  sorted by size and easy to slide out.  

and the stuff currently on the shelves... all categorized and easy to access.  the boxes are all labeled individually but also with sharpe/masking tape on the shelf itself so i know what's stacked in back.  and masking tape is so easy to remove so it's easy to switch all the labels around.  i don't care that it's not pretty... it works and i'm loving it.  

there's definitely more stuff in the basement that needs to be sorted and organized and reboxed so it can go on the shelves but that's a huge project for another day.

and i need to move our food storage over to this area as well.  although that shouldn't be too difficult.

our basement has four "zones" and this is the smallest one.  the goal is to get all of our stuff in this section so the other three zones can be open space for playing.  hockey, baby bikes in the winter, man cave, etc.  it's totally possible... i just gotta keep trucking along.  so i'll continue riding this warm weather spring cleaning wave and hope this basement project gets done before fall!