Weekend Excitement

This weekend I decided that there were a few projects that were well overdue for being done and decided to tackle them. Ever since Phil and I got married and moved in together we have had many bins of stuff that was never really sorted or organized. At our apartment, it was easy to ignore since our storage closet was up in the attic of the building and I never saw the mess. When we moved, I made an attempt at organizing the bins, but it never truly happened.

When we moved into our house, we started remodeling projects so quickly that organizing all our stuff just fell to the back burner. To make things worse, because of so much construction, the closets we did have organized were completely disheveled and their contents literally thrown into the attic to be dealt with at another time… well that time arrived!

I know I needed a MOJOR re-organization, so to do this I first emptied out all the areas in the house that were filled with clutter. There were three closets, our basement storage room and everything in our attic. Just doing that took over an hour! At the same time we had a Comcast guys installing cable and internet, the first thing he said when he walked into the house was, “oh, just move in?” We should have just said yes!

These pictures really do not do justice to how much stuff there was!

When we finished, we had seven bins left over,
I guess we were storing way to much stuff!

Phil and I together spent nine hours going through bins, organizing, throwing away, goodwilling, and putting things back into their new organized homes! Each space now has a very specific purpose and everything is labeled, sorted, folded, and cleaned. I feel like we have purged our house of so much junk and garbage and am so happy with the results!



Our E-Bay/Amazon Pile



The massive goodwill pile

The garbage pile

Saturday we had a bit of excitement in our basement as we discovered that all the drains in the house were backing up into the [unfinished] part of the basement. *Side Note: Phil and I were just saying that there are things we miss about living in an apartment… like being able to call maintenance when something is wrong… end side note.* Thankfully we knew exactly what the problem was since this happened last summer as well! The drain line to the street sewer gets clogged with roots and things and needs to be cleaned out every so often. Because we have an older house in a neighborhood with many old trees, our problem is something that should be addressed about every year.

Last time this happened, Phil was at work and I literally had a breakdown because the basement was flooding and I had no idea why. Thanks to a great family friend who happens to be a plumber, I was able to figure out the problem. However after a $400 bill from Roto Rooter, while we thankful for a dry basement once again, but knew there must be a better [cheaper] way! Thankfully Home Depot has a rental center and we were able to rent the machine for $60 for a few hours to take care of the problem!

Phil spent about 45 minutes working on the pipes and had it all clear an in perfect working condition (for at least another year… thanks old house!). Have I mentioned how amazing my hubby is? Organizing, fixing plumbing, AND he took me out on a date Friday night… this man does it all!