Basement Remodel - week of July 11

"Remodel" is really too fancy of a term for what we're doing, but for lack of a better description that's what I'll call it. Last summer when we moved our school room to the basement we intended it to be phase 1 of a bigger school room project. This summer we are working on phase 2. Phase 2 involves knocking out this wall and thus enlarging our schoolroom by about 8 feet:



But before knocking out the wall, we had to get rid of all of this stuff which was behind the wall:


Pretty depressing, huh?

And once we get rid of all that stuff we have to dismantle the wooden shelves and rebuild them on the other side of the basement before we can knock out the wall. Whew! Definitely a sequential vortex! (that's what my family used to call projects that had multiple layers, where doing one thing required something else first, and that thing required something else first, and so on. Isn't "sequential vortex" a descriptive phrase?).

Emptying the shelves has been my project this week. Going through our basement stuff, purging and organizing, has needed to be done for years. It's not a fun job, but it's a great feeling to get stuff OUT of our house! Each day this week I have filled at least two large garbage bags with junk to throw away, as well as at least one bag for Purple Heart. I have gone through files upon files upon files, sifting through old papers from as far back as my husband's initial Navy days (that would be 26 years ago!). I found my college acceptance letter! We threw out an entire garbage bag full of old floppy disks. Yes, an entire bag full of just those. I mean, this is stuff that should not still be in our house! We have taken 3 old bookcases and 3 file cabinets to the curb to bless others. Each time we take old furniture or bags of stuff out of the house I feel a bit more freedom. Isn't it amazing how "stuff" can make us feel so tied down?

Unlike the show Clean Sweep, we do not have the option of taking every single thing out of the laundry/storage side of our basement and then putting only those things back that are worth keeping. We have to sort and purge as we go, moving things around and piling stuff on one side of the room while we work on the other. It's not ideal, but it's slowly getting done.

Here are some before and after pics from this week.

I knew the schoolroom would get totally trashed during this project, needing to temporarily house stuff that would eventually go back on the storage side. So before tackling the storage side I carved out a desk area for myself so that I could continue working on school prep throughout the summer. Here is before:

And here is the same area after:


Here is that pic again of what was behind the wall:


And here is that same area today:


Our plan is to dismantle and rebuild the shelves on the right first. Then move the stuff that's on the shelves on the left onto the newly rebuilt shelves, and then dismantle the shelves on the left. Make sense? We don't have a lot of space to work so we have to do one side at a time.

This is the whole length of the laundry/storage side. Washer/dryer is behind the camera, and currently there is an "L" shape that curves past the filing cabinets and goes behind the wall that we're planning to knock out. This is before:



And looking at the same area after:



The baskets to the right are my laundry baskets and they sit directly under our laundry chute. The clothes fall into the wicker basket and we can sort whites into the white basket on one side, and darks into the brown basket on the other. This sorting system is helpful for those children who are just learning how to do laundry. The baskets are sitting on our old school cubbie! Which now makes a great place to store tubs of organized stuff. The boxes stacked on the left of the photo are my husband's that he has to go through at some point.

I have things just about ready for my husband to start dismantling and rebuilding the shelves. Whoo-hoo! ;-)

(and if you're curious, we threw out the high chair ~ it was pretty nasty ~, stored the exersaucer up in our attic, and saved the crib which found a new home behind the laundry baskets. I love having a crib to loan out, and I hope to use it for grandchildren some day!).