Basement Storage - Episode II

By now many of you have heard about my organizational to-do list. Basically I preplanned the projects I should be doing in advance and now I'm trying to stay on schedule. Some tasks require large scale organization endeavors, while others are merely upkeep. For November I tackled my basement.

Down in the dungeon (it's unfinished) I'm blessed with a large space and plenty of room for storage. I even turned one nook into a sports equipment airing chamber. The bad news is that this luxury of space has prevented my wife and I from making storage decisions.

"should we keep this?"....."I don't know...put it in the basement."

The good news is that I already started the process of grouping things together and putting them in Roughneck storage containers that can survive the moist conditions of a basement. As a result, I was not trudging through loose items jumbled together in no particular order. There was a little order.

That said, my half-baked system was nowhere near perfect. Often things were just thrown into storage boxes with half-hearted thought about their commonality. Furthermore, since I was thoughtlessly putting everything down there, I now had over twenty totes! Things might have been packed but I didn't know where they were and it was a real hassle moving everything around to search.

And so I opened them all up and went through everything and sorted items into four piles;

* Keep

* Charity

* Recycle

* Junk

After that I further refined my keep pile into

* need once a year

* need 2-4 times a year

* need more then 4 times a year

Basically all the stuff in my basement was stuff I seldom used but there WAS a difference between Christmas decorations and extra linens.

With all this done it was easy to store everything in totes, label the full contents on the outside and stack them from 'needed less often' to 'most often'. In my case I could keep them all visible and figure out which one I needed with a glance.

 
 
From this I learned two main lessons:

1) Maintenance is a lot easier then full scale reorganization

- advice as old as the hills but very true....build maintenance into your plan

2) Make your pattern simple and obvious

- likes together

- label everything and make it visible from the outside

- stack in order of use

I'm beginning to feel the momentum from my to-do list. Projects aren't as hard and I'm feeling the payoff in saved time and eliminated frustration.

Being Patient

A few weeks ago when I was home in Virginia, I had a grandiose plan to help my mom organize her basement.

A week before Thanksgiving I called and was chatting about our plan for the weekend.  She said that she really didn't want to do that...they had company coming for the football game later in the day and it would just  make a mess.   I reminded her the visitors would not be perusing the basement (that is, unless they needed 17 dining room chairs, which they could find down there!).  She still pushed back that she really didn't want to tackle it at this time.

I tweeted about my dilemma and Deb Lee, one of our professional organizer friends ( @dallisonlee ) wrote back to me.  Her advice really resonated with me:

So, over Thanksgiving, I let mom know that I would help when she wanted it and I wanted her to know I was available to assist her with this monstrous task when she was ready.

This was a very big lesson for me on patience and I also learned that organization is more of a personal process than a one-size-fits-all solution.

Although, someday, I hope to update you guys on a clean and chair-free basement :)

Please Help My Mom Get Her Basement Organized!

The last time I went home to Virginia, my mom invited me to join her in the basement.

  She led me to a corner that had a ton of decorative flowerpots, home decor items, and party serving dishes.  Then she said to me,"Take a look if you want anything...I don't need all this stuff. I don't have any more room in the house for it."

Let's back up. In many ways, I am very similar to my mother.  My mom is really organized - see an example of her closet on the right that she and my stepfather designed and built.  They combed through magazines to find the perfect combination, then he built it from scratch in his workshop.  She selected neat organizers that matched from Tuesday morning.  Overall, it is quite impressive.

The Basement Problem

However, while I am a "purger" and like to get rid of anything in my home I don't actively use (except all my art supplies!!), my mom is more of a "keeper".  Her basement has become a collection place for so many items from their combined households when they got married.  The issue is that they don't have room in the house to put the decorations, extra chairs, etc. anymore - see below:

The decor area:

The graveyard of rocking chairs and dining room chairs from combined households:

The overflow area for household supplies that she does not use everyday (this needs to stay in the basement but I want to organize it better for them):

My mom is feeling a bit stressed from the clutter in the basement.  She feels guilty that she bought some things for use in the house, but ran out of room.  Many of the decorative items are not returnable.

I am thinking a yard sale might be best to sell a lot of the things they don't need, and then they could do something fun and spontaneous with the money.  That could allow her to feel like the purchases were not a waste.

Progress Thus Far:

I mailed her some tags that I bought at Target to start tagging things that she knows she doesn't need, things she wants to keep, and things she is not sure about. When I go home over Thanksgiving, we are going to go through it all together.   I will likely return in the Spring to help them have the yard sale.

Help me!

I would love your help.  Do you think the process is right so far?   Any tips or pointers for the process, or do you have any advice on having a yard sale?  This is my first time, so welcome your expert input!  I look forward to keeping you updated on the progress!

Samaritan House Makeover - Step 1

You may remember an older post of mine about helping out with Samaritan House's basement where I sometimes volunteer.   Samaritan house is a homeless shelter that allows guests to recover from hospital stays.   The home was donated but is a bit older so storage space is definitely at a minimum throughout the house so the basement tends to get the bulk of the clutter.   I am happy to say that over Memorial Day weekend we were able to start the first part of the project.

Let me refresh you on the before scenario:

 

The cardboard boxes were not optimal.  In fact, there was a big rainstorm while we were there and the floor flooded a bit.   There were open items which could easily be destroyed by the elements of the basement.

Listening to some of the solutions from our readers, we ordered a lot of steel reinforced resin shelves.  They only take 5 minutes to snap together, the feet elevate the shelves above the floor, and they hold up to 1000 pounds!

Next we used different color totes to designate different types of items being stored:
-Silver - donations of clothing, grouped by size
-Tan - serving items such as extra napkins, plates & serving dishes
-Blue - miscellaneous household items like board games
-Green - Christmas decorations that were donated

We got a good start on the project but needed to bring more lighting to clean out the other areas and finsih the project.

We hope to update you soon on the final progress!

Samaritan House Basement Makeover

We take this months’ adventure out of the home to Samaritan House. Samaritan House provides recuperative care to the homeless who are just out of the hospital. The home that was donated for the shelter is very old and with limited storage space. On a previous visit, we discovered that their basement has a lot of space potential for storing items such as clothing donations that the guests can take when they leave, as well as household items (holiday decorations) that are only used seasonally and don’t need to be accessed year-round. However, the current shelves are rotting and the design doesn’t allow for efficient storage.

A group of friends and I plan to give this basement a makeover. Let me know your thoughts on what we should do to organize this space. I am thinking plastic shelving with clear totes for seeing contents, but am open to ideas!