Basement Business

Have you ever seen a picture of our basement?  Hmm… Well, it’s time.  Honestly, the basement is sort of the Cinderella stepchild of our house.  When friends venture too close to the stairs, I typically go to great lengths to cut them off.  Personally, I would love to pretend that the basement doesn’t really exist, but since it’s our storage/laundry/project space, I’ve had to come to terms with its existence. 

Not long ago, I realized that the clutter in our basement was threatening to overflow into the main living areas.  It was pretty bad.  Disclaimer: Living in a two bedroom, one bathroom home with almost zero closet space makes it challenging to find storage for normal items, like office supplies, extra bedding, etc.  Don’t judge!  Now for the public humiliation…

Don’t you feel better about yourself now? 

I continued to put the job off until I heard that my dad (with a lot of my mom’s help) purged his office.  It sort of put me to shame, considering the…ahem…verycluttered/messynatureofhisoffice.  As much as I love my dad, I’m supposed to be the organized one!  Family pride was at stake.  So I cleaned it. 

This is not my first basement cleaning rodeo, and I quickly realized that if I wanted to create space and actually purge, then I needed to commit to getting rid of some serious paper.  As in, those old college notebooks and most of my teaching binders were never going to be used again.  Gut check time.  Okay, really, I mean I haven’t looked at them in six years, so is this really going to be the year?  Didn’t think so.  I did salvage some material from a few of Professor Lamb’s short story and Mark Twain classes, but I decided brutal elimination was my only hope when it came to all other paper.  You would not believe how many binders and notebooks there were.

Before you panic that I threw out the baby with the bathwater (what a weird saying…), let me assure you that nearly all the work I do is now electronic.  As a teacher, I’m constantly updating my curriculum on the computer, and I make sure to save it to our school’s backed up H drive, along with saving it to my PC and to a flash drive.  In the past I’ve created bazillions of binders, only to find them obsolete the next year when I decide to tweak curriculum.  Ahhh…the wonderful feeling of freedom that only comes when you loose yourself from the paper monster.  The longest part of the process was saving paper clips and binder tabs, which require very little room to store and will definitely be used again. 

In addition to recycling several trees, I moved items into more common sense spaces.  So instead of housing office supplies in three areas, I corralled them into one.  You get the idea. 

Do I now love our basement?  Nope.  Is it full of cute organizing bins and baskets.  No.  Is it the kind of basement space I envision living with forever?  Not really.  But it’s a lot more functional and at least I don’t get heart palpitations every time I put in a load of laundry. 

So what’s holding you back from trashing those notebooks that you haven’t even blinked at for a decade?  Confession time!