My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Basement

We moved into our house right before Thanksgiving from a teeny tiny apartment in the city.  Somehow, even though we lived in a few hundred square feet I managed to collect and store quite a few things.  First of all, I am a kindergarten teacher.  I have tons of thematic bins full of books, puzzles and lots of random trinkets.  I can't resist a good deal on ANYTHING that I could possibly potentially someday use in my classroom.  I am also a HUGE holiday person.  I love Christmas, Valentine's Day, Halloween and every little holiday in between.  Hence MORE bins filled with ornaments, wreaths, wall hangings, holiday photographs and tons more.  This combination left me us with tons of stuff.  Stuff that ALL seemed to end up in the basement.  

Finally last weekend my boyfriend we couldn't take it anymore.  The bins, boxes and bags seemed to be creeping out further and further from their one wall into the center of the basement.  It was ridiculous!  Luckily, the creeping box incident happened during the exact same weekend that Target was having a fantastical shelving sale.  We had researched tons of shelves at every store ranging from Ikea to Home Depot.  We were afraid that wood would sag, plastic wouldn't be strong enough and metal could rust.  Finally, we found coated chrome shelves that are wide, open and super tall.  We liked these ones in black the best.* 

Here is the super scary view of of the gigantic pile.  I sorted and sorted and we threw away/recycled/donated tons of stuff.

Here it is from the side

And here is the man assembling the shelves.  We bought two extra large shelves and one regular sized shelf to fit our space.  The first shelf took about 20 minutes to assemble and the other ones only took about 10 minutes each because we knew where we wanted the shelves and could line them up with the first shelf.

Here it is, all nice and organized!  

On the left, we have my school and teacher things.  In the two grey bins in the middle are seasonal clothes and on the right are holiday bins, wrapping paper and other items.

Here is the whole thing one more time... I just can't get enough!

To prove to you how much more space we have now that the mess is contained, here is a video of Mr. House Fairy channeling Speed Racer on the roller blades that he rediscovered when we organized.  Love it!

*The dimensions listed here say that the shelf is about 50" high, but ours are closer to 72".  I am not sure if this is a typo online or what.  We bought ours in the store.


- Mary