Back in April, Kiddo started sleeping in the basement — when we moved in, we built in a bed in a back room and shortly after her birthday, she claimed it. In August, we asked her if she would like to move her bedroom downstairs and we could use what is her bedroom for an office (which is what we had intended to use the other basement room for). Make sense?
Initially she was weepy about it… but she has since warmed up to the idea. Today, we decided to start the process by clearing out the closet in the back room so that she could move her clothes in there. We had been using the closet as a storage area for extra clothing, camping stuff, and winter things.
We moved most of the camping stuff into the Hobbit house for now (tent, coolers, campstove, etc) — it’s sheltered and that stuff was built to take the elements somewhat. I also put my heavy raingear and Kiddo’s play tents out there.
I found a HUGE stash of tshirts I’d forgotten about — Kiddo claimed a few and the rest went straight into bags for charity. Also discovered a stash of shoes and something Kiddo christened “bagception” — bags inside bags inside bags.
When all was said and done, we had 12 bags of clothes and three boxes of stuff we didn’t need. I piled it into the van right away and after dinner, drove it straight to Value Village. We returned and Kiddo continued to purge as she rearranged her clothes and stuff into the new closet. Now she can get changed downstairs.
I also added a couple of corner shelves over the bed so that her clock-radio and other things had somewhere to live and we added an adapter that includes USB ports for charging her gadgets, including the phone she will soon have.
Next step will be moving stuff out of the “office” area — which will mean finding a new place for the cat litter and cat food… which requires a few other dominoes. In part, we have to wait until one of the beds moves out of Kiddo’s room. SIGH.
However… when we are done, we also hope to set up part of the basement as a gym area — we have an exercise bike and weights along with a heavy bag and other stuff, we just aren’t using it. If the basement were full height, I’d move the Wii down there too.
The biggest thing we have to address is the craft situation. We have a LOT of craft supplies. Option one is to make stuff with the supplies then sell what we make… option two is to just start clearing things out. Not sure yet which way we’ll go…