Emptying the Storage Unit

Back in June, we got a storage unit to hold all the junk we had in the basement for the last decade. It was quite a bit of stuff. The highlights are as follows:

• Christmas stuff
• Halloween stuff
• Easter stuff
• Camping stuff
• various hobby stuff
• Waterski/boat stuff
• junk, lots and lots of junk

Its amazing what accumulates when you have a storage area like a basement to simply put stuff in. It accumulates. And its seemingly all important stuff. With the storage available, its hard to get rid of any of it. So, it all went into the storage unit.

Before extracting it from the storage unit, after the basement was completed, we made a few rules. It had to go through a QA process. We had to justify anything that we brought back home. Everything. This has been quite the chore, and has been spread out over various evenings and days. For example, the Christmas stuff... It was contained in various boxes, i think about 6 containers in total. Each of those containers was opened, and each item was transferred from that box to another box. We actually purchased some new containers that would stack better, were simply newer, and much more sturdy that previous containers. The plan was to transfer into these containers anything we wanted to keep, while discarding the rest. Either to the trash or to DI. Quite a bit has gone to both locations.

I am proud to announce that the Christmas, Halloween and Easter stuff all went thru the rigorous process of QA first, and were successful. We cleaned a fourth to half of the stuff we had been saving all these years. With limited space now available to us to use in the basement, some cleaning and pruning was necessary.

As the weeks have marched on, and we continue to pay the fee to store stuff, some of which is not anything we really need, while other is necessary, its obvious that this can be addicting, and we could simply quit and keep the storage unit. Paying out monthly payments to keep the stuff. However, that was another of the goals of this task. Have the storage unit during the summer, maybe into the fall, but not much after that. We are now dangerously close to 'after that'. This next week will see the last of the items removed from the unit and placed in their final resting home. Be it our home, or elsewhere. In fact, one item we were particularly sad about throwing out actually got placed last night in a good home. We pulled all the carpet from the basement when we finished it. A large green carpet that had covered those floors for over a decade. Last night, another family was in the storage unit place, and came wondering by to talk to us. We offered them the carpet, on a whim, and they accepted. It will now live in their basement, covering their floors.

We should have taken pictures of this process, similarly to the pics of the basement progress. It would have been fun to see the items disappear from basement, rematerialize in the storage unit, then disappear again.

Soon, we'll be back to just our house and surrounding property that contains all of our worldly possesions. Soon.