The basement: a whole lot of stuff

Do you remember that awesome movie Home Alone? It was and still is one of my absolute favorites of a movie. Every December I pull out the movie and Allen and I will watch with our own Christmas tree twinkling in the background.

In the movie the young boy, Kevin, is afraid of the basement because of the dark furnace at the bottom of the stairs. In real life I am afraid of our basement because of the amount of junk/dirt/mess we have at the bottom of the stairs. Its not good.

It could so easily be better. It really could. I know that over night we can't turn the floors into our dream floors or put sheet rock up on the walls but we can clean. I mean, I do own a dust pan and a broom.  I think that a large part of our problem lies within too much stuff.  We really have too much stuff. Allen and I both keep things that have memories attached to them. Maybe its t-shirts from a college event or a coffee mug that was a grandparents but it starts to pile up. We have a lot of things and pieces of furniture that we do not need.

Take for example my love of blankets. I love blankets. I love to feel cozy and wrapped up. So we have quite a few around the house. Every once and awhile I think " what about homeless people, wouldn't they love this blanket?" "Do I really need this blanket?" And year after year I keep my stash. How silly is that? How selfish is that? Something will be done about that this weekend. But it doesn't end there really. We have pieces of furniture that our grandparents or great grandparents owned. Or we have old clothes that we might one day fit into again. We have bent nails and old pots and pans. Just. Too. Much.

I am going to look into goodwill and see if they can come by the house and pick up a few things. Things that I know were mine from college that Allen doesn't have attached too. I can freely give those things away. His things are going to much harder to deal with. He wants to "save" them for a garage sale. I totally appreciate his desire to make a little cash but at the end of the day I know us and we are not planning a garage sale any time soon. Hopefully once I start sorting through things and giving them away he can see the stuff that is left that he needs to deal with.

I am going to document the slow going process of basement clean up. It will not be pretty, these pictures that I share. But hopefully it well help me get my tukus movin!