Ugly and Embarrassing

So, it seems not posting is the new normal. Maybe September will get a little calmer, although, considering it is about 1/3 of the way in and I am here for the first time.... who knows?


I have been working on getting ready for school. We were supposed to start two weeks ago, and we did a couple things, but for some reason, my week turned into one thing after another and my days disappeared in a blur with no concrete thing to touch to prove I actually did anything each day! Last week was field trip week: the first week of school for our town..

My house has turned into a very messy place.

So, I have been trying to re-clean and re-purge my house to get ready for School Start - take 2!

Which brings me to the Ugly and Embarrassing mentioned in the post title.

 I decided to tackle the basement. Ugly doesn't begin to explain the basement. If you remember, last summer we unexpectedly moved Frank's mom into the house. In order to give her a space of her own, we put a couple rooms in the basement for Olivia and Catherine. The space they now occupy was the exercise room and the playroom. (sounds a lot fancier than it really was!) All the stuff in the basement was put into 1/3 of the basement, which was already occupied by the boiler, air handler, water heater and electrical box; oh yeah, all my stuff in storage was there, too.

Take a deep breath and take a look at the basement before I started. (WARNING! not for the faint of heart!) It is rather extremely embarrassing, but I really want a record of this.

I plan to never see it like this again.

I know, never say never!

Yeah, it was that bad. I couldn't stage it if I tried!

I informed the littles that there was no way the basement was going to be cleaned out without getting the Legos in order. So, they were required to sort Legos anytime they want to watch TV (it rained: bonus TV time!!!!)

Here was my family room:

Oh, this project was turning into a nightmare that was taking over the house!

After a day of cleaning, the basement looked like this:

Can you see the difference? It is difficult in the pictures, but there is one! There are now buckets of stuff to toss and buckets of books to donate and more Legos to sort.

The next day was more cleaning:
Proof I did make my children spend time in the dungeon basement with me...

And now..... drum roll, please:
The finished basement:

And after one more day of Lego sorting: the finished Lego station:

Final cost: $0. !!! Yippee! All materials were found in the mess that was my basement.

All it took:

5 30-gallon trash bags to the dump

removal of a Foosball/air hockey table

3 days of cleaning

5 days of sorting Legos

 AND, I can report that after 1.5 weeks, it is still looking quite nice down there!

Off to purge the camera of more pictures to keep updating this place (Nathaniel just got home from Scouts and is very excited I am finally updating here)