When we moved into our house, we brought soooooo muuuuuuuch stuuuuuff! It was overwhelming as we had three households plus bins and bins and bins of things that had traveled to many of our temporary homes and they seemed to multiply. When living in transit, if you can't put your hands on something and you need it, you acquire another...
So, upon arriving in this house, we divided the basement into three sections of bins. One was for things we use often or regularly like our camping gear, Christmas decor, sports equipment etc. (We don't have a garage so it all heads down the stairs...) One was for things that needed to be sorted and most likely sold, donated or given away. And one was for long term storage - things we don't want to part with but don't need access to very often.
Despite a major purge a few years ago, the bins have continued to multiply and random junk has found its way into the nooks and crannies.
After getting water in the basement last week from the melting snow (yay for walking downstairs to put in laundry in socks and simultaneously hearing and feeling the telltale sploosh of water in the area rug in front of the washer. UGH!) we decided it was time to get the bins in the long term storage area stored appropriately. It only took us seven years!
A quick(ish) trip to Home Depot brought home $200 worth of lumber to get the job done. We spent the rest of the day moving bins, building custom shelves, and freezing our tails off! With the temperature at 30* outside, it didn't feel much warmer downstairs at ~45*. I had to stuff insulation and sweep cobwebs to keep moving and stay warm between surges of action!
I'm so thrilled to have a handy husband but even happier that he knows that I can help. I'm quite handy with the chop saw and the screw gun and I'm no slouch hauling lumber. In short, we make a great team!
We had planned to weed through several of the long term bins but we ran out of time. But we now have such a wonderful, spacious, easy to access shelving system that we were able to temporarily sort them by those we need to go through and those we know we want to keep as is. Another rainy day will give us the chance to finish that job!
And now that we've got the design worked out, we plan to build another custom system for the items we use regularly.
Ideally, at the end of this process, the third "need to sort" pile will be history and free up a whole section of the basement. And... give us access to the troublesome window that we are pretty sure is the culprit for the occasional water issue.
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