basement.org

While Bradley worked on installing our water heater, I was busy doing a little basement.org — basement organization, that is. We were initially not going to store anything in our basement. It’s dark, it’s creepy, it’s smelly, and it floods occasionally. Unfortunately, our garage is currently being used as a garbage pile for storage. Our other storage space was our attic, but since we insulated, it’s out of commission. We threw everything into our master bedroom, but thing got so out of hand that we could barely walk through the room without walking into / on / around / under something.

After a couple of weeks of living with a mess, we cried uncle. It was time to move our stuff into the basement. We pulled out our IKEA Broder shelving and got to work:

We looooove Broder. It’s easily the best IKEA purchase we’ve ever made. The shelving is super heavy duty — they sell it for use in garages and laundry rooms. We got it to make a closet in a Brooklyn apartment that had none. When we moved, we took down the shelves and planned on using them for the garage, but they’re perfect for the basement, too. Or almost perfect.

They were a little too tall so we lobbed off a few inches from each leg. I held the pole steady while Bradley cut it with a reciprocating saw:

After cutting down the lengths, Bradley went back to plumbing the hot water heater and I installed the shelves. Here’s how they looked by the time I finished:

We did 4 shelves on the right side and 3 on the left. We didn’t want to block out the window because there’s a limited amount of light downstairs. I threw everything on the shelves to make sure it would fit. And then I pulled out this puppy:

My DYMO LetraTag label maker. I got it at Target for $20, and I chortled about it all the way home. I’ve wanted a label maker since high school. Seriously. I’ve always been kind of an organization nerd. A closet Martha Stewart fan. And, after living in a construction zone for the past 6+ months, I’ve gone a little over the edge. We’re going to get this house organized from the ground-up. Literally, since we’re starting in the basement.

Here’s how the basement looked after a couple of hours of crazy-lady-time:

We picked up some big storage bins from Target, too. The green ones were about $10 each. And the smaller plastic ones were $6 a pop. The really small shoebox style ones are from the Container Store, and we’ve had those for years.

I made an emergency kit in a small blue container. It has candles, matches, a first-aid kit, hand warmers, cans of dog & cat food, flashlights and batteries. After going through a flood evacuation, we’re not taking any chances!

The shelves are meshy wire, so air can circulate in and around the plastic bins. This is awesome for us because our water heater helps circulate and dehumidify the air. We were a little worried about mold growing on our plastic bins, but we think they’ll be fine if they have air moving around them.

I stored like-with-like. The electrical stuff all went on one shelf. The painting stuff was grouped together across a few shelves. Big buckets of plaster and paint went together. Here’s the breakdown:

The empty bin on the top shelf was Bradley’s idea. We’re going to use it for carrying supplies upstairs. Instead of wrasslin’ with armfuls of random things, we can just throw a bunch of stuff we need into the bin and carry it all in one trip.

The right side is mostly paints and painting supplies. We used the top shelf as a catch-all area for miscellaneous things that don’t really belong anywhere else. Right now it’s got hardware for our other Broder shelving and a few bins of sandpaper. We also put our emergency kit there so it’s easy to grab-and-go if we need.

We also set up some hooks on the sides so we can hang stuff like our respirator masks and work aprons. That’s another thing we really dig about the Broder system — they have a ton of little attachments that help make it easy to get organized!

We weren’t stuck in the basement all weekend. We’ll be back with more updates from the renovation front. Things are starting to look nearly-finished upstairs. Stay tuned!

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We weren’t paid or perk’d for anything we wrote in this post. We just really, really love the Broder system. (And I would marry my label maker if I could.)

Dining room plans.

We weren’t planning on remodeling the dining room next. For months now, we’ve been daydreaming about attacking the laundry room. Literally attacking it. With sledgehammers. That room is a wart on the rest of our house, and we always assumed we’d start ripping it apart as soon as we moved upstairs into the guest bedroom and office.

Then the temperatures started dropping and we freaked out. We really don’t want to be reliant on an oil burner all winter — it would cost a fortune and isn’t exactly eco-friendly. So we decided to put in a wood-burning stove in the dining room. And, just like that, our laundry room went on the back-burner and we started making plans for our other wart. (We have a multi-wart situation going on ’round these parts.)

Here’s what our dining room looks like in 2D-birds-eye land:

No renovation would be complete without a few challenges:

• We have to work around a wood-burning stove.
  See the grey box in our floorplan? That’s a steel plate that has to sit under our wood-burning stove just in case sparks fly out. We can’t have furniture too close to the stove for the same reason.
• We have to insulate 2 walls.
  The top and bottom walls in the above floorplan face outside and need to be insulated. This means we’ll lose over one foot of width. The room is currently 16′x16′, so it’s not that huge a deal, but it’s still a bummer.
• The dining room is the central hub of our house.
  We have to walk through it to get to different sections of the house. The kitchen, laundry room and half-bath are on one side of the dining room. The living room, front door and stairs leading up to the bedrooms and office are on the other side. High-traffic to the max.
• It’s our way in and out of the house.
  There’s no street parking in front of our house (really old, narrow street made for horses, not cars). We have a 2-car garage and a small driveway, but they’re located behind the house. So the dining room entrance is the closest and most convenient way in and out of the house, and that’s what we use. Our front door (put up in 1881) is basically just eye candy. I think we’ve used it, maybe, 3 times in the past 5 months.
• There are so. many. doors.
  There are 5 doors / doorways in this room alone, and we have to leave enough room to work around those.

We were pretty stumped about what to do, so we made a wishlist of all the things we wanted in the room:

• Exposed rafters and brick (got a head start on that one!)
• A window seat
• A place to sit around the fire
• A place for our 4-legged friends to nap by the fire (Jabba’s a fireplace fanatic)
• Somewhere to sit down and take off our shoes when we enter the house
• Somewhere to stash things we like to grab as we’re leaving (keys, gloves, hats, scarves, umbrellas, etc)
• A dining table big enough for 6
• Firewood storage area so we’re not constantly running down to the basement

Yup. Kind of a tall order; when we wish, we wish big. We didn’t know if we could fit everything into one 16′x16′ 15′x16′ room. We talked over a lot of options; having a 4-seater dining table, having a round dining table, even having no dining table. And then, out of the blue, we came up with this:

• Get rid of the basement door.
  There’s another entrance to the basement through the porch. If we get rid of the one in the dining room, we have enough space to….
• Build a wall-to-wall bench with storage cubbies underneath.
  That way we get a biiiiig window seat by the fire. And we can stash firewood in the cubbies right under our seating. Plus we can use one of the cubbies to house a bed for Jabba. How perfect is that?? Added bonus: we know an upholstery guy who can whip up one long bench cushion in whatever fabric we supply. And a matching cushion for our furry friends.
• Find or build a rectangle dining room table.
  We want something that can seat 4 people in chairs and 2 people on the bench. It has to fit the space in a way that boxes in the whole fireplace / dining table area, so we may have to build this one ourselves. Fun!
• Build an mini-mudroom setup by the entrance.
  We’ll build another bench setup by the door with storage cubbies underneath for all our grab-and-go stuff. There will also be a boot tray to keep mud off our floors. And we’re still working on a coat storage solution. (Our coat racks always end up being total eyesores because we overload them.)

We’re still working out the design of the bench, but we’re starting pinning things that catch our eye. We’re thinking something simple like this:

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But waaaay longer and with a cushier seat. We’re talking sofa-like cushiness. We also dig the more minimalist look:

Source

As soon as we’re done upstairs, we’ll start shopping for fabric and get this sucker going. And, of course, we’ll share the step-by-step with you guys. Stay tuned for more updates from our casa.