January ... finally!

So being unemployed, I have more free time than I've had in ages. But for some reason I have found every excuse in the world not to post on my blog. As an update on my resolutions I'm staying strong on the spiritual one. No job yet, but still looking. And my Italian ... I broke down and bought the Rosetta Stone. We'll see how well it works.

During the month of January I was super busy cleaning and reorganizing. I took it upon myself to clean the messiest room in the basement. It was horrendous! However, we turned it into a very workable space. We bought a bunch of shelves and put them up to make things tidy. We also bought a bunch of space bags, which I think are the most genius inventions ever. However ... Warning: if you have sharp fingernails (Bonnie) do not attempt to close the zipper on the space bags, you will likely slice right through the plastic and make the bag worthless. Also ... Warning: do not throw sharp objects (such as knives) around the space bags. Said sharp object will inevitably find its way to the space bag and puncture a hole ... even the smallest hole renders the bag useless.

So the following are before and after pics of some of the handiwork (Dad helped a lot and Mom did quite a bit too). There were two rooms cleaned. One of the rooms I forgot to take any before pics, so you just get the after pics.

Before Pictures

The view from the stairs into the basement.

Pile-o-junk

More of the pile-o-junk

Mom kept telling me "save the empty cardboard boxes". I don't think she realized how many empty cardboard boxes she had saved over the years!

Halfway There

Amidst the pile-o-junk there were 4 (yes 4) TVs. All of them went to the DI. We ended up taking 1 loveseat, 1 chair, 1 baby craddle, 4 TVs, 2 pieces of exercise equipment, and a lot of clothes, crafty stuff, etc to the DI. We also had about 2-3 truck loads that went to the dump.

A lot of the pile-o-junk in the middle of the room is cleared out. However, behind the entertainment center is a whole new world of stuff to go through and DI!

It's Done!

The view from the stairs into the basement now that it is clean.

We actually took that green chair to the DI too. This picture doesn't do it complete justice because there are clothes on the line. But, they were all still pretty wet, so I wasn't going to take them down only to rehang them.

Beautiful cleanliness! We bought about 5-8 new sets of shelves to get all of our stuff up off the ground and organized.

Dad went through a bunch of the food storage buckets and filled some of them and stacked them nice and neatly against the wall.

This is the room I cleaned 1-2 days before. For those of you who knew what it looked like, this is probably a big shocker!

Here is the same "day before" room. Its the food storage/furnace room. All nice and tidy now!

The next project ...