Cleaning Out the Deep Basement - Before and After Pictures

On tap for this weekend was our monthly purge/clean-up of a room in the house. We had assigned the month of February for the Deep Basement, aka the only part of our house that is (1) truly underground and (2) unfinished. We did some re-arranging of the room after we acquired our ping-pong table last month, but there was still a mess of toys around it (we didn't clean up too much down here after the party last week, either). 

BEFORE PICTURES

Immediately when you go downstairs, there are many boxes. Many boxes are not labeled. Some are labeled, but with funny descriptions like, "End of Packing - Random Stuff." Clearly, random stuff that was VERY IMPORTANT and needed to be moved from Florida to Kansas. :)

Directly behind the ping-pong table, there is a wild mess of toys. And a Giant Eel. 

This is to the side of the ping-pong table. More toys. The mess actually continued a long ways along the side, but we had already started cleaning up over there before I thought to document it. :)

AFTER PICTURES

Will and I sorted through the papers in these boxes for hours. Some were easy to dispose of (like the "Annika's small toys" box that was COMPLETELY FILLED with McDonald's toys). Others were harder, like the "random stuff at end" box that had important paperwork intermixed with crap. We got rid of a lot of boxes and paperwork, shredded others, filed important paperwork, and labeled anything in boxes that was important enough to stay. It is a little disappointing that after all of that work, the basement shelves look....the same. But they are MUCH better to us. :)

View behind the ping-pong table now - notice that there are NO TOYS! We put down a mat for a border but this will make for a much better set-up for ping-pong. And Goodwill now either loves us or hates us due to all of the toys that Will dropped off this afternoon. :)

View to the side of the ping-pong table. All of the toys are organized and either in boxes or on a shelf. We got rid of a few very large toys that weren't being played with anymore that took up a lot of space, which opened a lot of space up. Everything remaining are toys that the children actually play with!

Cleaning up the deep basement was not the only thing we did this weekend. For one, Daniel spent lots of time snuggling with our cats.

Daniel was intent on me capturing this image of him holding up a poor, resigned cat so that we could get a picture of her belly "which has spots on it!!"

Before bed tonight, Daniel worked on his Valentine's Day cards for "Friendship Day" at his school (which does not celebrate Valentine's Day, but which very conveniently celebrates Friendship Day on February 14th...). Following Big Sister's lead, Daniel had cat Valentine cards with miniature tattoos to give out. He worked very hard on signing his name to each of the cards.

And finally, more good news - Annika actually ate a bit of solid food today, hooray! She is still low energy but she did eat most of a bagel today. Hooray!