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Organizing an unruly cellar

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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?

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Einbauschränke – Wardrobes

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Since July we have been living with two clothes racks and the rest of our clothes in suitcases and boxes. It is starting to drive me a *little* bit nuts. We’ve driven to Germany twice now to investigate about building some built-in wardrobes (otherwise referred to as Einbauschränke in our household) in our bedroom.

The whole idea of a built-in wardrobe is actually more in line with an American closet system. Typical Swiss bedrooms are rectangles with no closets, which dismays many Americans, including my mother. Swiss usually have a tall wardrobe for hanging things and sometimes a dresser for storing other items.

Wardrobes are by far more popular than dressers and just like you move your light fixtures with you from apartment to apartment, the wardrobe usually comes too… unless you are lucky enough to sell it so that you do not have to move them!

We thought that the idea of building a built-in wardrobe would be better because we can avoid using anything for the back of the wardrobe, thus avoiding mold problems in our fresh new build. It would also be a more permanent solution that hopefully adds to the value of our home.

After visiting a few different places, I’m almost sure we will work with Möbeldick after seeing all the Noteborn wardrobes in their store.

Noteborn has tons of options for built-in and standalone wardrobes, with finishes in wood, glass, with frame or frameless doors and all kinds of inside options.

It was a little overwhelming trying to figure out what we want inside the wardrobe.

After living with our other wardrobes for four years, I was sure that I wanted more drawers! The problem is that they are pretty darn expensive! Each drawer is about €250 or $337 a piece. Ouch!

But I do not want to live without some drawers and this is pretty much the cheapest we can get for built-in wardrobes, so we are a little stuck.

How much money would you put into your clothes storage system? Do you have fancy American closets I can be jealous of? Tell all in the comments. 🙂

(All images via Noteborn.)

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Reduit

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It was hard to organize the pantry aside from stacking a bunch of stuff in a pile, so it was clear that in order to utilize our 4.4 cubic meter (155 cubic foot) pantry, we would need some shelves, and tall ones.

We headed out on a Saturday for a day full of shopping at IKEA, Obi, Jumbo, Micasa, Coop Bau und Hobby and Migros Do-it. We were hoping to find shelves for the basement as well, but all the ones at Obi were weirdly rusty and all the other stores had really expensive metal shelves. We ended up passing on them because in the same trip we bought a very heavy basic picnic table and four tall bambu plants for the balcony!

Before we picked up the bambu and picnic table at Jumbo, we had to decide about the reduit shelving. We looked over all the options of wall mounting and discussed what was a good idea cost-wise and practically with our cement and brick walls all around. Thinking in the heat of Jumbo (it felt like a furnace!) was overwhelming, but after melting for 30 minutes, we finally decided on some wooden shelves.

Back at home we got to assembling!

It was a little more expensive to buy a corner shelf, but we thought it would be handy, so we bought it anyway. After the fact, I realized that the additional beams required for the corner shelf make it kind of annoying to use, so I sort of wish we’d just bought normal rectangles and put them next to each other.

Anyway, whatever… we bought them. It’s done.

It was a tight fit in the back of the reduit to install the shelves and my back was actually giving me a lot of problems after pulling it on Friday while moving a sofa with Kay.

When the entire shelf was done, I actually had to crawl out through the bottom area before we could scoot the shelf into place in the corner.

Et voilà… organized storage!

I’ve got cleaning products, plastic bags, recycling, brooms, electrical items, towels, etc.

Eventually I would like to move the bath towels out of here, but we found out that my idea for a bed with drawers won’t work because the frames we bought for our Tempur mattresses have motors that don’t work with beds with drawers. (Sadness!)

The only other thing I’m wondering is how I would possibly fit an extra fridge or freezer in this reduit… but I’ll save that project for a later date.

How do you organize your closet spaces?

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Organizing the Flat

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Boy does it take awhile to get settled in a new place!

I think it usually helps if you actually own all the furniture you have before you move (we need to buy a lot of storage shelving and wardrobes) and you know, if your bathroom isn’t rendered inhabitable right after you move in. Still, somewhere between holding up all those awnings (God, my arms!!) I managed to start unpacking.

Since we finished moving earlier than planned, we went ahead and bought two super  tall bookshelves to start organizing our office. The rooms are so tall that we can actually fit two additional shelves on top of the highest Billy model, making the bookshelves about 280cm or 9’18” tall.

Thank goodness I still had all my plastic bins from our built-in-bookshelves in Zürich!

We also had that orange sofa bed up there delivered fairly soon after moving in, but the guy was totally weird and gave us a sofa with the wrong feet, so it didn’t sit properly on the ground. And it was pretty gross so I wanted to strip the covers and wash them pronto, but it took a good week before the room was clear enough to take the cover off.

Down in the basement, we had this:

It honestly doesn’t look much better now because we still don’t have shelves down there, but we threw away the broken bed frame and some boxes and Styrofoam, so that helped a little. Kay will get his bike out of there as soon as he finds his bike lock and stores it in the bike room in the garage.

By the entrance to the cellar is our little wash area with a laundry tower on one side and a sink on the other side.

The cellar is a decent enough size, definitely bigger than what we had in Zürich, and since it’s tall we will eventually be able to utilize shelving to clear everything up, but for now it’s a little chaotic.

We also bought that dehumidifier you see because we spotted a little dampness on our back wall during inspection and we don’t want any mold problems. The building is still so new that the concrete walls are quite moist, so we will leave the dehumidifier on for quite awhile. In fact, before we bought the hose for it to drain directly, we had to empty the 20L container every morning and evening. Without it, it’s roughly 70% humidity down there… and with the dehumidifier it’s keeping it around 45%. Maybe that’s keeping it a bit dry for summer months, but since the walls keep oozing out humidity, we just want to soak that up before problems start.

The home inspector also recommended keeping our things away from the walls for quite awhile. (I forget how long of course) so when we get shelves, we’ll probably set them up in the middle of the room to start with.

Now, here are those weird stubby legs that came with the sofa bed. They are not from the Karlstad series and when attached to the sofa bed, the sofa just sat on the sofa bed parts and not the legs. It was pretty random. We pulled them off and stuck them on our normal 3 seater Karlstad until we buy metal legs for the living room sofas.

The sofa is also noticeably shorter with these legs, but at least with the old square legs we could set the sofa bed on its feet and start taking the covers off to be washed.

So that’s what’s going on with the house at the moment. Baby steps as we acquire more storage room. Our flat in Zürich sure did have a lot built in with the laundry room and the attic storage!