Rearranging 2012

My husband and I are both pack rats. We're not collect-everything-never-throw-anything-away-hoarding-pack-rats, but we both tend to keep things longer than we should. This is apparent to most of friends when they see the condition of our house. It never gets terribly dirty - just very cluttered.

So in anticipation for Baby Number 2 (Don't freak out, people! I'm not pregnant YET!), we've been wanting to move Penelope into the room next door (office) to her current room (nursery). Well, this isn't going to happen if the office is still a mess. And the office isn't going to get any better until we move all the stuff in there downstairs. And the basement has become a dumping ground and NOTHING will get done until we get that area finished. And so, we started in the basement.

We started in the garage. I had a bunch of boxes from before I got married that desperately needed to be gone through. I was able to take 2 boxes of collectibles, and 7 boxes of pre-marriage-Sarah-stuff down to 3 storage bins worth of stuff. Travis was able to do the same (ok, he didn't have 7 boxes, but still!). Combine that with reorganizing the Christmas and camping stuff and we significantly increased the amount of storage space in the garage.

Yay! Organization!

Once the bulk of the junk was out of the garage, we started in the main room in the basement. We had A LOT of stuff to go through and have made HUGE improvements. We've thrown a lot of stuff away , and have donated a lot too (I've already dropped off 3 boxes and a couch to Goodwill). Here's what we started with:

So. Much. Stuff!!

After a couple of weeks of working a few hours (almost) every night after Penelope went to bed, I am happy to announce that the main room of the basement is complete! Tonight, we moved the rest of the stuff out (empty boxes, storage bins, trash bags, random things that are staying in the basement, etc), vacuumed, and shampooed the carpet. I must say, I'm very happy with our progress! We're hoping to get the basement finished by next week so we can then dive into the office!

Smells like clean! (The bookshelf is staying there. We just need to go through the books)

Travis found a really neat home modeling app for the iPad that has allowed us to figure out exactly how we want to place everything. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the rearranging process. Since this room is now complete, we can start moving things out of the downstairs bedroom and putting them where they need to go in this room. And then that'll free up space in the bedroom to be able to move stuff from the office down here, and so on and so on! Stay tuned for more updates!