Completed: Basement clean-up.

So.

Although this blog is only several months old, this is a post 3.5 years in the making.

I explained a little bit of the backstory of this in my post about cleaning up the laundry room. Basically, when we moved in, the movers dumped all the boxes in our basement. I unpacked like a demon over a number of weeks (since I had a baby who never, ever slept and I was seriously delirious with lack of sleep, it took longer than I would have liked), but I left my husband's boxes down there, because, well, they were his boxes. Some of those boxes had been sitting, crammed full of stuff and untouched, since we got married in 2007. At our last house, they were in the attached garage, so I didn't have to look at them, but here? Here they were in the lower level of our house (it's a split level, and the basement is finished, so it's not a true basement, but it's how we think of it) and I passed by the heap every time I did laundry, scooped the litter box, or searched for a book on our shelves or something in my craft area.

As time went on, the heap of boxes grew messier. Stuff got added to the pile, things shifted around as my husband dug through the boxes for items he was searching for, I pushed things around to make room so I could actually see some of my craft area. And still he left those boxes there. "Even if you just go through one item a DAY," I begged him, to no avail. The mess remained.

And all the while, my anxiety grew. Messes and clutter have started making me very anxious, and beyond that, this area of the house was embarrassing. When we had people over and they caught even a glimpse of what that area looked like, I was mortified. Even when the rest of the house was in perfect order, the shame I felt over that basement was gargantuan. I'd been refusing to clean it, because hey, not my stuff...but as time went on, it became more and more obvious that it just wasn't going to get clean unless I did it, and honestly, my anxiety was so bad over that area that something had to be done.

And since part of the reason I started this blog was to leave no task unfinished, I began getting myself into the mindset of cleaning the basement. I started with smaller projects, worked my way up to the laundry room (whose mess was starting to resemble the basement itself!), and then it was time.

Are you ready?

It's bad.

Here it is.

It's okay to scream. Really.

That's not even the worst of it, to be honest. It's looked even worse at times. Can you see why this set off my clutter-induced anxiety so badly? It was getting to the point where I literally dreaded going down there, and I was getting tired of being afraid of- and being unable to use!!!!- an entire floor of my house. Another glimpse:

Is this worse? It might be.

This one was actually after I had started doing a little bit of cleaning, moving some stuff around and whatnot. On the right hand side, you can see a corner of the dry bar, basically just a large countertop with some open storage underneath. My son and I have cleared this thing off multiple times over the years we've lived here, and my husband keeps dumping stuff on it (he's, uh, got a messiness problem. Good thing I love him!). I stopped cleaning it off and my son gave up similarly, and the mess grew and grew. 

But no.

No more.

I desperately needed to Get It Done.

So I did.

It was a Tuesday when I started. I moved things around at first, making enough space for my daughter to play on the SmartCycle someone gave us (but that we've never hooked up to the TV because we don't want to get her started on video games this early! She has no idea it even hooks up to anything and just enjoys riding it like an exercise bike), and then I started going through boxes. I had a huge pile of recycling, a smaller-but-still-huge pile of garbage, and five hard plastic containers for storage in the crawlspace. And methodically, item by item, I began going through the boxes down there.

The things I found!

Bills (paid at the time, but then stashed and for some godawful reason, PACKED AND MOVED. WE PAID TO TRANSPORT THESE, SOME OF THEM MULTIPLE TIMES. YES, I'M SHOUTING; WOULDN'T YOU???), some of them from before 2010. Empty envelopes from cards and mail received years ago. Paperwork from cars and property that we no longer own. Bits and pieces of tools and things to be used with said tools, decorative items, military gear (my husband got out in the mid 2000's), backpacks with broken zippers, and my favorite item of all:

No phone it here; it was just the box.

WE TOTALLY NEEDED TO STORE THIS FOR YEARS AND THEN MOVE THIS THREE TIMES, RIGHT????? (This wasn't mine; mine was orange.) This box went straight into the recycling pile, and I moved on to the next ridiculous item. All in all, I managed to condense the heap of boxes my husband had been moving from place to place into four and a half plastic storage containers. That was it. Those boxes probably filled up an entire moving pod (which is what we used to move back here from Tennessee), but the keepable contents would've only filled a back corner. Not cleaning and organizing your stuff costs you money, people!!! 

So yes, it was an exercise in frustration, and it furthered my resolve of being careful as to what I bring in the house these days. I'm not interested in my time being taken up caring for possessions; I want to spend my time doing and creating and making, not cleaning and dealing with STUFF. I don't ever want to have to do this again. And most of this stuff wasn't mine in the first place, but I'm still glad to be in this mindset so that I don't get trapped by my own personal possessions.

The basement really didn't take as long as I thought it would. Two full days of sorting, organizing, and moving stuff around, and then this happened:

I nearly wept at being able to do this!

This was a huge deal for me to be able to do. 

I gave away a huge stack of empty boxes on Freecycle to a lady in my neighborhood who is moving- she was like, "Thank you!" and I was like, "No, thank YOU!!!!" I loaded up the car twice with enormous piles of stuff and dropped them off at the thrift store (and I still have at least one more, smaller donation pile). I gave my mom a few things. I organized my bookshelf, which had become a victim of my anxiety where I would just dump stuff on it and run out of the terrible basement, and I organized my craft area, which I'd been ignoring for ages, since I didn't feel like I could use it effectively with all the clutter down there. I organized, pitched, cleaned, decluttered. I. Was. Brutal.

Are you ready?

The difference is huge.

Check this out.

TA DA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's GLORIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you even? Because I seriously cannot. 

Even seeing that picture makes me heave an enormous, satisfied sigh of relief. The amount of times I've gone downstairs this past week, solely to admire the clear, empty space, numbers in the I'm-not-sure-I-can-count-that-high. The last time the basement looked this clean was when we were touring this house when we were looking for a place (the lady that owned it previously had passed away, so the house was empty), so this is an ENORMOUS deal. Everyone I've shown this picture to that knows us and has been to our house has had a reaction like, "OH MY GOD!!!!"

Yeah.

It's that good. 

So I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to get at least SOME things done these days. A lot of this summer has been dedicated to getting the house in a more workable condition, and I'm feeeling a lot of relief about the results. I have a few more projects to do- I want to pull the stove out and scrub it down; I want to scrub down my appliances that sit out (my Instant Pot, my rice cooker) and clean off all the dust and yuck that have collected on the sides; I need to clean the two closets in my upstairs hallway (waiting on my husband to put up the missing wall in the shower to do that; it's been down for, uh, six weeks or so now, and the parts of the wall that need to go back up are lying in the hallway. He works long hours and so his time to work on home improvement projects is limited, so we all just live in an ongoing home improvement project, basically). 

One box, one item, one old piece of paper at a time, I got the job done. 

And I'm feeling pretty proud about it. :)

Have you ever done a major clean-up like this? I'd love to hear your story about it.