July 2013: Cleaning the House, July 28, 2013

I haven't spent a lot of time in the basement.  It's not where a lot of people go, but this isn't (entirely) about other people.  I'd like a neater house for ME.  So, down to the den we ventured.  This is one of two rooms entirely closed off to the cats, so they were pretty eager to help me. They were less than pleased that they weren't allowed in the closet.  I really hope it's because they're cats and they hate closed doors, and not because there's something in there I should know about.  I'm betting on the cats&doors thing.

I worked on two opposite corners tonight, but don't let that fool you.  The room isn't that big in the first place.  It's 93.5 square feet, to be semi-precise.  I have a 1950's house, too.  That means I painted the walls without the use of a ladder or a step stool, because I can reach the ceiling, and I'm about 5'4 1/2".  Heh.

Just stuff.  I pile stuff in here.  Ideally it would be my home office, but I need to work on about two problems before it will fully be that.  One: there's no natural light in this room.  While I'd love to add a window (which would have the bonus of making it an official bedroom!), I don't think that's possible.  I'm only feet away from the property line on the North side, and I know the gas comes into the house somewhere on the West side.  And the one overhead light in the room is a small pot light in the opposite corner.  Plus, I need a new, comfortable desk.  And a new monitor to fit the size of the room.  My current monitor is from the late 1980s, and takes up approximately half of the room.  So now, I store stuff in here.

But when the wrapping paper goes into the closer where it belongs, it helps things a lot.  I also found a lot of things that needed to be taken upstairs (when I'm up there, I find stuff for down here, so it all works out...).  And that lamp needs to be taken out to the trash.  The light bulb burnt out, and I don't know how to replace it, nor do I really want to because it could really heat the entire room (not quite, but it does burn very hot, and the metal shade gets very hot).

I also worked in the opposite corner, but the before pictures don't really show what I did, but I'll give it a shot with these two.

You can sorta see the messy bookshelf there.

And you can sorta see some of the mess in front here.

See, it doesn't look much cleaner, but the bottom of that shelf is filled with rubber stamps that were all messy (plus a few in a plastic bag in front of the shelf that couldn't be put away because they didn't fit in the box), and the ink cartridges--both here and in the box, were a jumped mess.  I now have them stacked neatly.  I also put a few more things away in the black rolling case you can see in the first picture.

So, not a ton of progress, but I also did a tiny bit of cleaning of my desk, but it's not really visible because I had to rearrange a lot of things that I didn't do anything with, so it looks equally as messy.  But I know there's progress, and that's what counts.