It was time

With less than a month til school starts again, I HAD to get moving on the class area. The last year-and-a-half we've used one side of the finished basement and it worked out pretty well. Recently however, with Mike hoping to set up a consulting business from the house, he thought that room would be just perfect for his needs.  We decided to move his office there, and relocate the school room to the other side and do some minor renovating to open up the room more. Well his half of the move went well, leaving a mess on the side that is to become our school area/family room. 

Admittedly it began as a small mess, and over the summer it has become a HUGE mess. It went from being an almost finished basement room to a pit. It was seriously getting worse by the day, and I was beginning to have anxiety over it. BUT, yesterday morning I decided to bite the bullet and start cleaning.


I wanted to take some before pictures, and update as I progress, but didn't remember to the pictures until I had been cleaning for about an hour, so this doesn't really tell the whole picture. In other words, it was worse!

  Seven hours later, I had made some real progress, but still have miles to go before it's done:

Still need to clean out both closets and swap contents with the one bigger closet on the office side, sort through the second half of the room, paint the walls, replace ceiling tiles, decide whether the carpet can be salvaged and if not, replace it, relocate desk lights for the boys,  move the currently empty (because they're in the pond outside for the summer) jumbo fish tank to the office along with the elliptical, and remove the unfinished wall in the last picture to open the room up  to both the stairway and the slider that leads to the back yard.  Then, and only then can we actually begin to set up the school /family room. 

I'm really excited that I got rid of so many things that we simply don't need or can no longer use. Three recycling bins got filled, 3 large trash bags are headed for the landfill, and a full truck bed full of items were already dropped off at the Goodwill!

Stay tuned for more...