David and I spent pretty much our whole day cleaning. You see, with a new baby on the way, and Madeline become increasingly difficult in her crib we have decided that it is time to bite the bullet and transition Madeline to a big girl bed. We’ve ordered the furniture and bedding and I am excited to get to work decorating her room (remember when we did her nursery we did it neutral since we did not know what we were having). The only snafu we have been faced with is clearing out our guest bedroom so we can turn it into Madeline’s new room. Sounds fairly simple, right? Well, not if you have ever laid eyes on our basement, which is where all of the guest bedroom furniture needs to be moved to.
Our basement is unfinished and over the 4 years we have lived in this house it has been our dumping grounds for anything and everything that we could not find a home for upstairs. In the past I’ve referred to it as our “private shame.” I pretty much avoid, at all costs, allowing anyone to set foot in our basement. There have been a few times when we have had company over where David has said things like, “Let me show you my coin collection”, or “I’ll take you to see my deer head downstairs” and he literally gets the death stare from me since he should know by now the basement is off limits to everyone!
I really wish I had thought to take a “before” picture of our basement because it was pretty unbelievable. Basically when you set foot in it there were little pathways leading around the basement so you could theoretically get something if you needed it. It was enough to give an organized person an anxiety attack. Heck, I’m not an organized person (obviously) and it was enough to almost give me an anxiety attack!
David had a dumpster delivered to our house and we have been taking time here and there over the past 2 weeks to tackle a few things in the basement. Today, both of us were highly motivated and we literally worked for about 5 hours straight cleaning. For 2 people who held onto so much stuff, it was surprising to see how easily we let things go. We were pretty ruthless in throwing things away! My car is bursting with all of the stuff we are donating to Goodwill, and our dumpster is almost full so it was a very successful day!
As of this evening our basement is looking pretty good. We still need to do a little more organizing, but overall it is pretty impressive. Now when you walk down there you can literally see all four corners of the room, and Madeline was able to play down there without me worrying about what tower of boxes might fall on her head.
I’m sure I will keep you posted on how things turn out, since this is just the first of many projects we will be undertaking in the coming weeks. Hopefully those posts will be more fun as I tell you about painting the room, and decorating it for Madeline.
