Last week we talked about facing challenges and developing solutions for them. Today, I’ll tell you a story.
I’m not one for chaos. I do my best to organize and work step-wise through situations to keep the chaos to a minimum. So, home improvement projects tend to throw me off my game.
For the longest time we’ve wanted to refinish our basement as a game room, hang-out area for our kids and their friends. It was a mess. Like many unfinished basements it became a collection area for all the junk, bins filled with holiday decorations, and winter storage for all of our yard furniture. It was chaos and it was time to tackle the beast.
We began last year by taking everything out into the back yard, separated it all into three piles, keep, toss, and maybe. That eliminated more than 1/3 of the stuff. It took a half dozen or so trips to the dump, filling the family van each time.
Then I went to work on framing, drywalling, and painting the space. We broke it down into two spaces, a workshop space and a game room. As we were doing this it was amazing how much more stuff there still was. I kept having to move things around and soon we had another car load of trash.
Then we got to the stairwell. Our basement stairwell has a built-in storage area on one side. Everything came out of there and again, three piles, this time in our front living room. My head was ready to explode because we couldn’t walk through the room except for the single path we kept. But it was another two vanloads to the dump. All of the keep stuff was organized into bins. This space actually became our holiday decoration bin storage.
The workshop was built out with a pegboard and work bench and we separated the game room with sliding doors. The game room now has a crafting space (formally a built in bar) for Suzy and Faith and a small gym space for Ian. It also includes a six foot pool table, carpetball, and a dart board.
In the end, ten years of hemming and hawing about what to do with the space, how to do it, and complaining about doing it, took a little over a year to complete. We developed a vision for the room and an outline for how to get there. But each step of the way we filled in the detailed steps we would need to do to complete that phase of the process. Then we got to work and didn’t stop until it was complete.
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