Organizing

Our laundry room doubles as a storage room. When we first moved in we put a bookshelf in there for canned food, cake pans, the small kitchen appliances and, well, all sorts of stuff. The entertainment stand soon joined the bookshelf and in it we (and by we I really mean me) piled quilt batting, Christmas decorations, gift bags ... basically all sorts of more stuff. And those shelves were surrounded by totes of fabric and baseball cards and childhood keepsakes, which stuff was also piled on. I didn't take a before picture, so you will have to believe when I say it was getting out of hand.

Last month we decided enough was enough. We simply had to reorganize and make better use of our limited space. I emptied the entire room in to the rest of the basement and cleaned it. During that process I discovered the washing machine was leaking oil; luckily it wasn't too expensive to fix. We then moved in a extra fridge we had and removed an old fridge that was set up in the under-the-stairs-storage room and started to build shelves.

We kind of planned as we went, and it turned out very well!

Then came the fun job of putting everything back. I moved things back and forth between storage rooms, made a garbage pile and a garage sale pile. The rest of the basement still needs to be cleaned up and organized, but the storage rooms are amazing!

Now the rest of the basement is a bit of a disaster but with a little more cleaning and a little more organizing it will be just as clean!