Day 11 of the 500 Pound Declutter - The Beast Part 2

I get it.  No one has a pretty storage room.  That would just be freakish and wrong.  But we have had a really un-pretty storage room.  I mean the kind of a storage room you can't walk into because it's such a mess.  And yet it's also our laundry room.  And work room.  And furnace room.  And if you do walk in it and are stupid enough to just have on socks, it's that room where you will step on something sharp and scream a bunch of stuff in front of your kids that you shouldn't.  Or the kind of storage room that when it floods (every nine months) with raw sewage, you scream even worse things at the top of your lungs while your husband is trying to peacefully read "A Christmas Carol" because of the, well raw sewage on your feet, and the shear volume of your stuff that is soaking in human waste.


Ah yes.  Have I mentioned how much I don't love our storage room?

But I have forced myself to break it down into smaller, more manageable parts.  Like the luggage and the wrapping paper/gift bags.  And so yesterday, I thought I'd tackle this ridiculously inefficient corner.  Yes, that is an entire tub of candlesticks, buried under a pile of old picture frames.

 

So I was going to tackle that and the basement "pantry."  Yeah, not so much of a pantry, right?  But this tends to be where we stick extra cereal, cereal bars, paper towels, crackers, etc.  Can you imagine the fun when we had that sewage thing going on?

 

My goal was to get the food up off the floor and move the shelves closer to the door.  Creating a logical space for extra food.  But one that could survive the inevitable next very-un-biblical flood.

But then I found this.  I mean really.  What is a person supposed to do with their senior pictures portfolio?  Other than laugh at it.  And so I did.  The combination of huge naturally curly hair with giant wave-shaped bangs is a classic. To say nothing of the incredibly red lipstick.  Ah, good times.

 

And then I found this.  It took up more than half of one of the shelves.  The lesson here is, don't go back and try to relive those unrealized parts of your youth.  It doesn't work.  Growing up, there were two things I wanted that I never got (because my parents were smart).  The first was one of those giant doll heads that you put makeup on on and could pull the hair out to various lengths and cut it.  Thought that was the coolest thing ever.  Then again, a few years later I am pretty sure I asked for one of those cheap 102 shades of eyeshadow for $9.99 kits.  To my parents' credit, it didn't get either. 

The other thing I desperately wanted was a rock polishing kit.  Having grown up visiting the north shore of Minnesota, where there are, truly, lots of amazing rocks including some agates, as a 9-year-old girl, I could think of nothing cooler than shining those puppies up to make...well, to make piles of shiny rocks.  Again, probably to my parents' credit, I never got one.

Until a few summers ago.  When I was 33.  And we spent a day up in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  And I found a rock polishing kit at the Ben Franklin store there (if you have never been, you must go some day, the place defines "a trip.")  And on an impulse, I bought myself the kids a kit.  And that baby churned away for weeks in the garage (it is like having a dinosaur that grinds its teeth in the house, so it has to be outside).  And at the end I had, well, slightly smoother piles of rocks.  Rocks I had no idea what to do with. 

And I had this. 

 

Which is now on Craigslist waiting for some other 9-year-old girl to discover how cool it is, provided you are 9.

I cleaned out a bunch, I recycled a bunch and I tossed a bunch, too.

And now I can say that one wall of my storage room looks like this.

 

Yes, it's still a storage room.  And 2/3 of it is still horrible.  But it's better.  And there is no food on the floor (the pumpkin candle doesn't count).

In total, I cleaned out 10 pounds from the room.  Bringing the grand decluttering total to:

193 Pounds

Coming up next?  The playroom.