clean my basement

I attempted to clean my basement this morning. I felt exhausted about 20 minutes in. My son will be coming over tomorrow. Hopefully we can finish by the end of the day!

and I need to clean my basement! I know I can do it, it just takes time and dedication.

torrential downpours and a faulty sump pump produced a thin layer of muddy water over most of the basement floor. i keep everything important off the ground, but getting the water up, shifting everything to one side of the basement, mopping, and repeating for the other side at least gave me a view of the uncluttered, stripped-to-essentials cellar we could have with some more hours of devoted junk thrashing.

i’ve managed to do nothing on this goal in recent weeks, but have a reason to hope for the coming ones: the hot weather. as the temperature edged past 90 in recent days, errand trips to the basement reminded me how pleasant it’s going to be to put in some hours working down there. :-)

i was too sick to think clearly over the weekend, so during the hours that i was up and about, i devoted my self to more basement purging. found boxes behind boxes and emptied a couple of them.

found a bunch of cassettes, kept four to send to a digitizing company.

found mountains of photos, reduced them by about 80%, sorted the rest to send for scanning.

gathered all of the books and cds in the house, put the ones worth selling on amazon and shipped them in two big boxes to amazon’s warehouse so they can take care of fulfillment. hopefully, any lesser profits from doing it this way will be made up by not having the stuff around the house and not having to box 50 items separately and make 50 trips to the post office. this also got rid of two product boxes that were laying around the basement (from a dvd player and a set of speakers).

in the end, i filled the huge recycling bin to the top, and lugged the enormously heavy thing to the curb last night. good riddance!

i did gather all the old computer hardware, photograph it, and put it up for free on craigslist. someone should be picking it up today; that’s one more eyesore gone.

i reread part of “clutter control” and decided the upstairs closets and dressers needed cleaning. i was amazed at the amount that went into the “trash”, “recycle”, and “ebay/freecycle” boxes.

did some work on the basement in the meantime, and can return to it with more confidence that i won’t be bringing more from upstairs to add to the piles.

though as i type this, i realize that i should do the kitchen cabinets while i’m at it…

Time to get the rest of my house cleaned up. The office and guest bedroom are nearly clean! Now it’s time to go through the basement.

Looking for steps to get this done – any ideas?

It’s an unfinished basement that is chock full of tons of memories, things I never wanted but inherited, broken pictures, etc.

I know step by step but what supplies do I need and where do I start?

another full load in the giant recycling bin went to the curb this morning. in the course of purging boxes, i uncovered the various benches and chairs on which they were sitting. these have gone against the walls and are acting as holding places for the remaining boxes, making the work a little easier.