Shortly after we moved in, this is what our cellar looked like:

BAM. Junk!

We sold our shelves from our previous cellar to the next renter so when we moved in, everything – including our broken bed frame – was dumped in the empty room.

After a couple months avoiding going in the basement we trashed the broken frame and the Styrofoam floating around, moved Kay’s bikes to the bike room in the garage, gave most of the moving boxes away and finally bought shelving! Now the place looks something like this:

The sink by the washer still doesn’t have any shelving, but it works for now. We bought a dehumidifier when we moved in and it has been running continuously emptying tons of water every day. We will probably let it run for at least two years.

Opposite the sink wall is our washing tower, which also doesn’t have any shelving yet, so I just store all the laundry items on the floor. The top of the dryer now just has a sweater on it that I need to dry clean.

On to the goods stuff…. look at all my hard work!

Kay and I put the first shelf together with a lot of cursing on Kay’s part, but while he was off skydiving one day I stayed home and painstakingly built all of the other shelves by myself, to the great surprise of Kay. He was really astonished that I could build them alone.

And of course after I built them I filled them up! (That’s my job anyway as I’m the organizer in this household.)

I was also really chuffed that we could stack ALL of our outdoor lounge cushions way up high on one of the shelves. So much space being utilized!

We’ve still got a fair amount of empty boxes and we still could use some more shelves, but this is a pretty good start. We also have things to get rid of like our old coffee machine, old microwave, old sewing machine, etc. that are taking up space.

On this wall we put up some wine storage that we never had before and actually have a fair amount of wine down there from our housewarming party. We are not big on saving wine, so I’m happy we are starting a little collection. 🙂

There’s all Kay’s army paraphernalia and motorbiking items. Lots of green in this cellar!

Kay was very impressed with the organization and he helped to condense his things further whene I was done. He has more random things here than I do because I still have things in storage at my mother’s house.

Cross another big project off the list. How do you organize your basement?