Basement Clean Up

I know some of you have been asking to see photos of the new shelves the hubby built in the basement, so I tried to document some of the clean-up that happened down there.... Looking back at the photos, I hope you can even tell the difference! It's hard for me to see it, but maybe that's just because I've been looking at it for so long.

Anyways, the goal eventually is to finish off the basement, but for now it is serving as a storage area for all the runoff stuff that we don't want in our living space as well as a workout area (we keep the treadmill down here).  There is a LOT of empty usable space down here, so someday I imagine this will become the 'man-cave'.  LOL.

So, realistically, it really has only been 6 months since we moved into our new house, but the basement just became a dumping ground for anything we didn't know where to put or something we just didn't want to deal with. 

And before long, this is what it was starting to look like:

Pretty, eh?  Not so much.  (and I have to note that this is picture is in an in-between stage of clean up...originally, the entire wall behind the pile of boxes was covered with those black metal shelves...which was FINE, but we had run out of room on them, and it was hard to fit some of the Rubbermaid bins that I prefer to store things in on them...)

So, when the hubby offered to build some custom shelves in the basement...ones that my bins would actually FIT onto, I stammered something about how awesome he was and and shrieked "YES!"

My manly man spent ONE Saturday and hammered out those shelves.  I mean, seriously, he went down there, measured the wall, measured the bins, went to the store and started in on his plan.  He even let the mini me help him a little bit.  By the end of that day, my shelves were finished!

And so, out of appreciation of all his hard work, I knew my job was just beginning -- the job to sort through all of our stuff and put it on the new shelves.  Procrastinate, no more!

And so, I went from the above picture, to THIS:

The boxes around the perimeter of the room have since been removed (they were filled with trash and donation materials)...

Here's another BEFORE view of the room -- this is what you see right when you come down the steps and turn into the room:

And that now looks like THIS:

I left a few of the black metal shelves along this wall to act as my mailing and wrapping station --  it's really nice to have all of those supplies in one place!

Here's another BEFORE view of that same area, just looking back towards the steps:

And the AFTER.  I am going to use this shelf as my pantry overstock.  Eventually, when we re-run the electric in the basement, the chest freezer will go to the left of this shelf.

And the rest of those black shelves I had mentioned before?  Well, they got re-located to this back area that is solely for storage.  They fit nicely against this wall, I think, and now they are out of plain view.

And the shelves my wonderful hubby built me?  Look at them!  Aren't they awesome?  I loved them so much I convinced him to build more in the garage!  And he did it!  :)

He's so awesome, and I am so incredibly lucky!  :)