[life] the Aegean basement
I am halfway through cleaning our clogged basement.
When we moved in, more than a year ago now, all the stuff that we didn't have room for upstairs, didn't know what to do with, didn't care about, or, in some cases, had no idea what was in the box, went into the basement and has since festered there, gathering dust and further knickknacks, broken electronic equpiment, piles of books, etc. The space under the stairs became a graveyard for empty cardboard boxes. Basically the place was like the shore upon which the debris of our life washed up and then sat, reeking and abandoned, while above it, we went on our merry way.
No longer.
I spent most of the day going through the various piles of semi-rubbish and sorting it into Keep, Trash or Sell. I have a friend who wants our huge and unweildy grandma sofa, and will likely take some of our old dishes, etc as well. I'm hoping she wants the microwave. I'm going to tell her to give me 25 bucks and take whatever she wants, and then the rest of the Sell pile will go into boxes to wait for summer and our first garage sale. Trash is still sitting in the tiny hallway down there, waiting for Shawn to shovel the walk that leads out back to the BFI. He was supposed to do that this afternoon, but football intervened. The Keep stuff is slowly being integrated into rubbermaid containers and plastic drawer units. So far, I've boxed up the Christmas decorations, my old toys, and the miscellaneous wires and electronic bits that we just couldn't throw away because we had no idea what they were for.
I'm saving up my energy for when Ann comes for her sofa, so that I can rearrange the room into something halfway liveable. We have a double bed down there, and it would be nice to be able to put people up without having to give them the choice of the sofa in the living room or the junk heap that was the basement. Despite not being able to finish the job, its quite cathartic to see the tidy organisation under the stairs, the visible sofa, the visible floor. Our books are still overflowing both shelving units and several boxes, but I doubt that I'll ever be able to fully tame them. Books, like cats, have their own agenda.
When we moved in, more than a year ago now, all the stuff that we didn't have room for upstairs, didn't know what to do with, didn't care about, or, in some cases, had no idea what was in the box, went into the basement and has since festered there, gathering dust and further knickknacks, broken electronic equpiment, piles of books, etc. The space under the stairs became a graveyard for empty cardboard boxes. Basically the place was like the shore upon which the debris of our life washed up and then sat, reeking and abandoned, while above it, we went on our merry way.
No longer.
I spent most of the day going through the various piles of semi-rubbish and sorting it into Keep, Trash or Sell. I have a friend who wants our huge and unweildy grandma sofa, and will likely take some of our old dishes, etc as well. I'm hoping she wants the microwave. I'm going to tell her to give me 25 bucks and take whatever she wants, and then the rest of the Sell pile will go into boxes to wait for summer and our first garage sale. Trash is still sitting in the tiny hallway down there, waiting for Shawn to shovel the walk that leads out back to the BFI. He was supposed to do that this afternoon, but football intervened. The Keep stuff is slowly being integrated into rubbermaid containers and plastic drawer units. So far, I've boxed up the Christmas decorations, my old toys, and the miscellaneous wires and electronic bits that we just couldn't throw away because we had no idea what they were for.
I'm saving up my energy for when Ann comes for her sofa, so that I can rearrange the room into something halfway liveable. We have a double bed down there, and it would be nice to be able to put people up without having to give them the choice of the sofa in the living room or the junk heap that was the basement. Despite not being able to finish the job, its quite cathartic to see the tidy organisation under the stairs, the visible sofa, the visible floor. Our books are still overflowing both shelving units and several boxes, but I doubt that I'll ever be able to fully tame them. Books, like cats, have their own agenda.
posted by Karla Andrich at
7:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home