The shuffle of STUFF continues.
Lat Friday, I attacked Kiddo’s craft dumping-ground, the corner where we wanted to relocate the cat litter boxes. After much sorting, I have a big box of craft supplies to go to a daycare or similar; a garbage bag full of a lot of unfinished projects, scraps too small to be useful, and other assorted stuff; and one HUGE bin full of mixed paper for recycling.
I moved the cat litter and cat food out of the office — a first big change. This in turn allowed us to access the “office” flotsam — books, software, (very) old files, boxes of comics and so much other stuff. Some of it got moved up to the “new” office. Armloads of books were the first to come up and we snickered that all the FBML books were now only good for pulp.* Boxes of paperwork that predated our marriage, from a long-gone tech company, found their way to the shredder.
Eventually we moved enough to get a layer or two into the depths and to expose enough furniture to start measuring and planning for what will go where. Kiddo will get a desk out of the deal; initially she was stubbornly using a yoga ball to sit at that desk; now she has claimed Mike’s office chair
We continued gradually shuffling boxes from one floor to the other (trying not to make a trip up or down stairs empty-handed) through the week. Wednesday night, we made a bigger effort to unearth the table so it could be moved upstairs. We managed that, but moving the table revealed our “household files.”
UGH.
Mike wisely refused to move them another inch before we purged. All our old business files (pre 2004), anything from the strata at the old townhouse, stacks of “why were we keeping this?” papers and printouts, and any receipt for anything we no longer own (our first DVD player for example) got tossed into a big pile of “shred or burn.”
Tonight most of Kiddo’s furniture and shelving got relocated to the basement, aside from one deep shelf which just isn’t going to fit. We’re going to build her some shallow shelving instead, once we sort out what still needs to be held. Shelving will also be added in the new office. The best part about having an office setup? Mike will have somewhere to leave his computer set up, somewhere to actually have a business call, and even meet with people (who’d have thunk it??). Oh, and we will have a coat closet!! And room for shoes!!
Best part about Kiddo being downstairs is that she gets her own “zone” and doesn’t feel like she is under our watchful eye all the time. She’s pretty excited about what she has christened her “girl cave.”
Next we get to look at the rest of the basement and reconsider how we can best use the space. In part we want to set up the exercise bike and weights where we can actually use them. In part we want to re-examine how we use the area(s) for crafting and the storage of craft supplies (that stuff breeds, I swear).
=phew=
*FBML was “Facebook Markup Language” and was discontinued in June of this year.