But it's one of those things that needs to be done and is a long time coming. We took advantage of a Groupon several months ago for "College Hunks Hauling Junk" and two really nice young men (neither were college students, but one was the local franchise owner) came and helped us move all the trash and broken stuff left over from our 10+ year renovation of this old house.
It really was amazing how much stuff we had down there. The biggest pile was old wood trim and house parts - some of it over 12 feet long! We've found that it's impossible to find trim to match what's 112 years old, so it would be a sin to get rid of any of it. It must stay with the house. So J. and I's first order of business was to build a place tucked under the stairs to store all of it.
Next up on the list was to put together 6 large heavy duty shelving kits from Lowe's. My stockpile is spilling over from my pantry upstairs, so we setup space to store long-term food items, J.'s 500 gallons of grapefruit and cranberry juice that I got for free from couponing (there may be a little exaggeration there), and other household items. That area will be complete once J. has wired in an outlet so that we can move the chest freezer over to that location as well. It will be really nice to have it closer to the stairs rather than all the way across the basement.
Once that was done, we had cleared the middle of the basement and the next project was one that I had been dreaming about for a long time. I'm in love with stained glass and learned how to do it several years ago but I don't really have a dedicated space for a glass project or my tools. Ideally, you really need a large flat working surface and a place to cut glass. Obviously, the dining room isn't a good choice, as you wouldn't want to find little glass chips in your food.
A little over a year ago, I was in Lowe's to pick up something for our reno and they had 4 white kitchen cabinets on closeout for just $20 a piece. I guess they had just put them out and marked them down, because I barely snagged them before 3 other people. My vision was to put 2 of them side-by-side and then backed up to the other 2 to create a square, then put a thick plywood top on as a work surface. The more I thought about it lately, though, it would be nice to be able to move that thing around if we have to do wiring or plumbing work on the house and it will be heavy once it's all put together. So J. and I built a platform for the cabinets to sit on and bolted 6" casters to the bottom. Two of the casters have brakes so I can stop the cabinet from moving. And an added bonus is that the casters and platform raise the working surface about 9", which makes it much easier on someone like me who is 6 feet tall. I wish, in fact, that we had raised our kitchen cabinets when we did our last renovation because I sometimes get a backache from bending over when I'm cooking.
No pics for you today (sorry!) because I was too lazy to go up 2 flights of stairs and grab the camera. We're still putting the cabinets together and will hopefully have that done later this week. And I promise to have some pics for you then. But for now....J. and I are off to let the chickies out to enjoy the nice weather too.
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