Our basement.

Let me tell you how hard it is to have enough stuff to decorate/fill a finished basement room in a house that doesn't have that finished basement room yet.

HARD.

And it makes the unfinished basement room look like you two have a whole bunch of junk that needs to just be thrown away.

And yes, I'm sure we'll come up with stuff we can rid our lives of. But in our old house we had a finished basement. And about 90% of this stuff was out in that basement. And in this house we decided not to have the builders do the basement because we wanted to do it differently than they did. So we're left with an unfinished room. That we filled with all of the boxes of the stuff that will go in there. Which was probably not the best plan. Because there was no organization. And I've tried a couple times before to actually get a handle on the stuff so at this point everything is organized in to piles of stuff (like books, steve's electronic stuff that I'm pretty sure we can throw 95% of away, baseball equipment, leftover kitchen stuff that I would use if it wasn't in boxes but I haven't figured out how else to store it yet, decorations for the basement, and the stuff I'm not sure what I'll do with yet). It's been tough. And we'd put it all in our garage so we could get started with the basement but the garage is full of wood to build out the basement so we're kind of in a Catch-22 situation here. We had settled on building a storage closet first. But I would need to clean the hell out of that room. I hadn't felt like doing that yet, so that project was just TBD until I did.

Well. I thought so anyway. I had no counted on my dad.

Friday night my dad called me to inform me that he would be coming by Saturday morning to work in our basement and build the storage closet.

Wow! That's awesome.

Except it kind of wasn't. Because this is what my basement looked like when he called me.

This is where the storage closet was going to go. But clearly the boxes and crap would need to go first.

This part is the most clean. But notice we've got 2 TVs down here. ONE of them DOESN'T EVEN WORK!!! Yet we must keep it.

Believe it or not I'd actually organized this side. I mean it doesn't look like it, but I knew what was over here and I'd been trying to actually use some of the stuff in these boxes so they were kind of haphazardly just strewn about.

So yeah. I had plans for a relaxing Friday night to myself while the hubs was at UVA for baseball. And my dad totally ruined that. And only because he would be at my house at 10 and there was no way I was doing it before he got there.

So I buckled down and got to work. I cleaned for HOURS. I threw away TWO bags of trash. I was so proud of myself. I even managed to get some laundry done while I was down there since our washer/dryer is down there too. I was on a serious roll. And I still had some time after I was done to lay down and relax for a bit. I mean I passed out pretty soon after I laid down, but a good nights sleep was really nice too.

Here's the after.

WOW! It hasn't looked this clean since before we moved in haha. That dresser needs to go. Those glass pieces? They are trash. They belong to an entertainment unit we don't even have anymore. (I always joke that I'm the hoarder, but in all reality I think it's truly my husband with the problem. love you baby, but for real? get that glass out of my house!)

And ok. So it doesn't look like I got rid of much but I did. And I consolidated a lot of stuff. Steve's got a lot of electronic/computer/tv/wire stuff down here and I tried to get it as organized as possible and in to as few boxes as possible. We still have 21 boxes of books, but I'm going to try to get some of them unpacked in our bedwalls in our room. And I'm sure I could have opened up this side more if I'd stacked all this stuff up high but I didn't really want to risk it falling over. Some of these boxes (of books) have been in our storage unit for a long time and the boxes just didn't enjoy being squished for that long.

So there you have it. The beginnings of the tackling of our basement. It's going to be a project in and of itself, but we'll get there. I didn't realize how long this post was going to be because I had intended to show you the closet that got built, but that'll just have to wait for another post.