Days One and Two

The Great Basement Cleanout is well underway and man are we making progress. There is a ton left to do, but we're knee-deep in making headway. An unintentional side effect of all of this is that I cleaned out my bedroom closet and sorted through an embarrassingly overwhelming amount of clothes. I honestly had no idea how much clothing I owned. Today, I dropped off two and half ginormous bags of clothes at Goodwill - 72 pieces! The best part is that it was all stuff I'm too small for since I've lost weight. Bonus!

While I'm not crazy enough to share the state of my bedroom, here are some before and in progress shots of the unfinished side of the basement.

Deplorable, I know! Check out the horrible "storage" door thingies that were left behind by the "handyman" former owner. I HATE THEM. I call them the refrigerator doors. Finally, they've been removed and are currently residing in the dumpster.

That horrendous, useless, storage unit in the middle there? (The one with the paint cans?) I never would have thought to try and take it out, but Cait suggested it and we discovered that it wasn't attached to anything, so J went to town taking it apart and holy hell what a difference! Excellent idea, Cait!

Check it out! The ugly storage doors and center unit are now gone! I'm so happy! We have so much more space now to sort and haul everything over from the finished side to store while the carpet is installed/wallpaper is stripped/painting is done/baseboard heat is installed. This may not look like an improvement over the "before" shots, but trust me it so is (and it's even better now).

Tomorrow and Tuesday, the kids are off to Mom's so Cait and I can work uninterrupted and J is going to prime and paint the porch (which is still the crap brown color of the original house...after Tuesday it will be a lovely almond to match the siding). That was the other big project for this summer and since J was already taking the next two days off (originally for child minding while Cait and I worked downstairs), I came up with the brilliant idea that he could bring the kids to Mom's and do the porch! Do I know how to plan his time or what? I'm sure he'll be thrilled to get back into the office on Wednesday.

I've been talking about doing this for so long, that I'm still a little in shock that it's finally happening. We'll keep on keeping on and I think that, within 4-6 weeks (depending on how long it takes to get estimates and the baseboard installed), I will finally have the third floor of living space that I've been dreaming about.