clean my basement

I may start with the garage instead. Several years ago, I cleaned IT out and painted the inside and devised pegs on which to hang things like folding chairs and extension cords and rakes. My husband built the pegs and hung them up and it was neat for a while. Now that the car is gone, you would think it would be even neater? Not on your life. It has been taken over by 6 bikes (one of which is mine) and all the tinkering tools needed to build them and maintain them. Yesterday when I went to throw out some garbage, I stepped on the small can of varnish that Peter is using to finish his new handlebars and fell on my ass and now I have a nice bruise there. No more!

I have to clear it out at the far end and then build some kind of a basic workbench/table with some shelves under it for the power tools. Then I have to hang a peg board so all the little tools can be hung up in sight and in reach. A home for everything and all that. Three of the bikes do have homes, hanging from the ceiling so that is a good thing. But all the fiddly tools and things like cans of shellac have to get put away!

It’s so bad down there that I forbid my visiting parents to go into the basement, warning them that if they did, they might never make it out of there. The laundry is down there so I did their laundry for them, a task which I don’t mind (and in fact, secretly I like doing laundry but that’s another subject). We thought of setting up an account on Ebay to sell everything down there but now I hear that people are quitting Ebay because of the fees. Also there is the shipping thing, especially because we live in Canada. I could even stand giving it away to a good home. But we can’t have a garage sale in this ‘hood because there is no exit – you have to go out the way you came in and that creates traffic problems. I know it’s “just” a matter of deciding what to do and then doing it but… it’s overwhelming. And it’s not all my stuff, and I promised I’d never throw out his stuff because his father always did that without asking and that was just plain mean.