The Basement Hoard, 2 Years Later

It’s been 2 years since I shared photos of my messy basement and talked about all of my plans. The good news is that some of those plans have worked out. My husband does have his nerd cave set up and often has friends over to play Magic the Gathering and my craft room is set up and staying fairly organized!We have divided the basement space into three separate areas using giant shelves as walls. The far end is the nerd cave, the center area has been stacks of boxes and totes (all my stuff) and the other area is laundry land. This weekend I decided to start working on the center area. We want to set it up to be our paper craft/collage making area. We have an old school paper cutter (the kind you can chop fingers off with), some library card catalog files, file sorting shelves, and a drafting table waiting to be set up.
I made a ton of progress! However it doesn’t look like it (forgot to take a before photo). I labeled some of the piles to give you an idea of what all is down here. Once I get things more situated all of the holiday stuff will be put into a small storage room at the back of the basement. Right now that room is filled with chairs and bags (and bags) of fabric. Baby stuff will be eliminated. A lot of the totes will be emptied, they are full of clothing that needs to be sorted, sold, and donated. Personal memorabilia (photos, cards, and knick knacks) will be relocated to the up-upstairs. I have learned a lot:
1.  I seem to have some sort of obsession with glass jars/bottles and tins of all kinds.
2.  We are not minimalist, we like stuff and we like to display it all on shelves and tacked to the walls.
3.  I have a lot of fabric! (no really, A LOT)
4.  When the zombie apocalypse hits we will have enough supplies to survive (now we need to start stocking up on food).
Once we get this area cleaned up and set up I’ll share more photos.

That New Shelf Smell

I did not know that new shelves had a smell, but these definitely do, and it’s not good smell(it must be the wood shelf inserts).  Thursday in the middle of making my rainbow patchwork I had a brilliant idea, I needed some giant, heavy duty shelves for the craft room.  One of the most annoying things about cleaning up is that I lug several totes of supplies to the basement only to want them back up here in the next week and then the totes sit here in my dining room looking junky and back down stairs they go, it’s endless.  If I had big shelves they could just stay up here in the craft room on the shelves right?  Did I mention that when we cleaned the rest of the house that the craft room got skipped and so stuff (craft stuff) is just stacked up in there? and I don’t want to start hauling it out here where it is clean.
Sometimes when I’m cleaning it feels like I just shift things around, like a slow motion hurricane, so I thought I would document the process of putting a shelf in with some before, during, and after shots (well, not really after, more of a right now, but I’m not done yet).
As you can see, it went from messy, to cleaned spot, to shelves up, to starting to fill the shelves.  I would like to add that I am not responsible for the stickers, stencils and splotchy paint, they were here when we moved in.  The wire shelves are still up there in the last shot, they are just hidden by the pattern boxes and boobzilla.  I have a lot of my stuff sorted already and some of the excess supplies will be stored in the basement (we have even bigger and heavy-dutier (<- yeah I made that up) shelves down there).
I also have new shelves for the upstairs.  There is a room up there with a skylight where I take all of my product photos and those shelves will hold all of my finished projects that are listed in my online shops.  I’ll also be keeping craft show displays, mailing/packaging supplies and random stuff from my day job up there.  It is a weird room that is too small to be good for much, but it’s great for photography and storage.
I think I have some sort of shelf obsession, I have plans to build some for the living room too!
Have a super crafty weekend!