So, it's July. Saturday marks the unofficial half way point of Summer and it's all down hill from there! So far, we've had a pretty good summer. We've camped twice and had a great time each time. The weather's been pretty nice - we didn't put the A/C units in until Father's Day weekend and have only run them a few days total. The kids have spent time with Papa and Nana, attending VBS, played TBall, and more. We've gotten in a little school work but I'm not worried about doing that daily - I tend to save it for rainy days. I've worked on organizing some things and cleaning out a few things upstairs.
Over the past couple of months, I've had a goal in my head to make July "Basement Month". So over the past few days, I've cleaned like crazy upstairs, organized toys, cleaned floors, finished up the file clean out and more. All in preparation of focusing on the basement.
This is not an quick and dirty clean up - this is a "Empty it, Clean it out, Get Rid of it, Sell, it organize it" type of clean up. Here's the plan:
1) Every single item will be moved to the garage. I will be setting up a work table in the garage where I can sort things. This will happen over the month. I'll move a couple of bins up at a time, sort them, and deal with the stuff.
2) Every single item will be touched once (kinda). As I go through every bin, box and shelf I want to touch things once. By this I mean, it will go in one of four places A) The Truck to be donated to Good Will. B) The garbage C) The Sell Pile D) Keep it. So obviously "A" and "B" are easy to only touch once. As far as the "sell" pile - I'll either be listing the items on our local garage sale site or taking them to "Once upon a Child " Anything that doesn't sell would go right to Good Will. Finally, the keep it pile - some things will go right into a bin while other things will need to wait for a bin to empty so I might have to touch those items twice.
3) Once every item is sorted and cleaned out, I will go to work on cleaning the basement. All the corners, windows, and cobwebs will be taken care off. I plan on sealing some areas of the floor where the paint has chipped. (Sealing it with poly helps to eliminate the "damp" smell you get in a Michigan basement). I also want to add some simple curtains to the basement windows for the sake of privacy.
4) The Playroom - this gets it's own line item HA! Once the main area is finished, I'll tackle the basement play area with the same concept. There are shelves to clean off, toys to clean out, a rug to get rid of, and rubber squares to lay on the floor so the boys can play in comfort.
5) The Laundry Room - this area just needs to be cleaned. I also have school stuff to clean out and schools books to sell that we are done with or won't end up using for various reasons.
Once this is done, I'm making a few changes to my old system that wasn't working. First, nothing will be carried to the basement to be sorted. Instead the Good Will donation box will be in the garage. When I clean stuff out, everything will go to the garage. The only way an item goes to the basement is if it already has a home (bin, shelf, ect) to "live".
About every 2 years I have to go through everything in the basement and this is the year. My goal is to set up a system this time around that KEEPS me from doing this again! I might be more than a little motivated by the fact that I just wanted my brother move HA! I don't want to have stuff anymore that isn't loved, used and needed!
