Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Cleaning out the Basement

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been forced to start cleaning out our basement. We do not have a lot of stuff by most people’s standards, but we have well more than we need or that we can store efficiently.

I pulled out about 50 boxes. The highlights included sports equipment, children’s clothing, books and media. One off items included seasonal decorations, coolers and luggage. My short term goal is to get everything into the garage. Then go box-by-box cataloging items. Once the items are catalogued, they will be sorted into keep handy (monthly use or more), seasonal use, deep storage (annual use or less), sell, donate or discard. We do have some collectibles, but it makes more sense to display these items rather than have them stuffed in boxes. In terms of memorabilia, neither my wife nor I are particularly sentimental and we have managed to reduce these items to a couple of small boxes each.

The biggest challenge and fortunately the easiest to face will be parting with books and media. I intend to catalogue all of the items so that I can repurchase if and when necessary and start listing on Amazon.com for sale. Whatever does not sell in 3 months will be donated to the local library. My sports equipment will be harder to part with, but may potentially be easier to sell or store efficiently.

The luggage situation is interesting as we have about 7 pieces of luggage for our family of four. I think it will be easy to consolidate the occupied space by nesting the bags so that we are only really seeing 3-4 bags. With tools, bicycles, skis, golf clubs, and coolers going into the garage long term, I unfortunately see a future with only one car parking in the garage, but my goal is still to have two cars in there.

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