Reclaiming the basement...

When we first moved into our house, we loved the basement. While the ceilings are low (less than 6 feet under the braces), it spans most of the footprint of the house. It was open and had a lot of possibilities. Plus, there was a large work-bench area for projects.

Then, we began moving our stuff in. We found that with the basement partitioned into a few smaller spaces and a larger one, we could easily hide all of the stuff upstairs into the large room in the basement when company would come over. Or whenever we'd stock up on our food storage, we could easily dump all of the food in the basement without having to organize it! And all of those Sam's Club boxes that we'd pick up? Yep, you guessed it--right into the basement (who knows? You'll never know when you need to box up and move on. Besides, cardboard makes good fire starter material--always important to have 10x as much cardboard as you'll ever need during the winter!). We're also big into canning (or, at least I think that we ought to be). We picked up several dozen of Mason jars that we'll use someday, when we have more energy or time or willpower.

When the piles of stuff began migrating into the other rooms in the basement and when I had no more room to work on a small table project, I decided that it was time to clean up a bit.

Wow! It is amazing the kind of junk that we've been storing. After working for about an hour and a half, I managed to reclaim a third of the basement storage area. I was surprised at how much we had been storing that we'll never use. I also realized how much cardboard we had--an exorbitant amount.

Its a liberating feeling, getting rid of stuff that's been piling up for years. While there is still a lot to do in the basement, it feels like we're making great progress.