Delving into the Basement

Yesterday was productive. We went into the basement with the intention of throwing out a lot of things, and were successful. There are two parts to the basement. This was the part that's actually underground and we call it "the rock room" because it was built around some giant boulders. It was here that I found at least 5 plastic tubs of books and school supplies that I last looked at in 1996 when I stopped working in the NYC school system. I'm glad to say that all those boxes were dumped. We also threw away boxes of college textbooks, an old futon frame and an old air conditioner. When my parents moved about 10 years ago they gave me a bunch of boxes from their old house....although at the time I said throw it all out, they wanted me to decide what to keep. Most of that stuff went also. I only found a few things worth saving. Next we have to work in the other part of the basement. We've already thrown out a lot of things like an old desk, strollers, metal cabinet, and I've donated several bins of toys and clothes to Dave's office (they have clients who can use those things, and they were all in good condition.) One little problem is that for years I taught these freelance science classes to kids and so I had boxes of things for topics like music, gravity, fossils, etc. that had to be ready on a moment's notice. I still have those things. There are also a lot of nice things-sets of dishes and glasses for example, that have sat on a shelf and never been used because I never had the room for them in this house or I had small children and didn't want to put out some of the more breakable things. Now that we are renovating, perhaps those things can be put into use. But until then, they have to stay in the basement. Then we have some things like records (we have not listened to a record since we moved here in the early 90's) old Sports Illustrated Magazines (I already dumped every old magazine I ever had but Dave isn't quite there yet.) Still with all that dumping (we're taking advantage of the fact that we have a dumpster) when you go downstairs you cannot really tell. Unless you saw the "before" pic it's hard to tell how much progress we've made. Still, it's motivated us to continue on this journey and have the basement function as a more organized storage space and not "the dungeon" as we have come to think of it.