Digging Out

Remember I mentioned that we cleaned out the basement last week?

Oh. Hell. Yes.

Our finished basement -- recreation room, if you will -- looked like one of those places you see on those HGTV decluttering and organizing shows. You know the ones. The couple has an office full of crap, or a garage full of crap, or a bedroom full of crap, or sometimes a whole house full of crap, and the Organizational/Decluttering Consultant/Expert helps them throw out all of the irrelevant stuff and neatly stow all the important stuff. It usually involves new organizational and storage doodads, beautiful paint jobs, and a few bits of trendy but functional furniture.

Well, we had a basement full of crap. Witness, if you dare, the "before" photos. First, the living area of the room.

And then there's the desk area:

As you can see, big piles of disorganized crap.

We dove in, separating the wheat from the chaff, the donate-ables from the trash, the men from the boys...

Papers that were over two years old. Toys! Tools! Tchotkes! Obsolete electronics! Layers upon layers of dust! We worked for over three hours, and ended up with four full garbage bags of trash, four big boxes of donations, and lots of electronics to recycle. Stuff we kept was actually put away. Then -- vacuuming and dusting. Arranging and storing. Moving boxes of my mother's beautiful Haviland Limoges china from a box on the living room floor to neatly stored in a cabinet that formerly housed SonnyeBoy's old toy trucks and board games.

Friday we took the trash and recyclables to the dump, while Purple Heart picked up the donations.

And we started using our lovely, clean, organized basement.

That rug wasn't even visible. Neither was the seat of the recliner or the couch!

Look! You can actually see the desktop and sit on the couch!

Yeah, the nekkid torso stays. Hey, it's art. That's what Joe tells me, anyway.