And Then There Were Three...Temporarily!!

There's lots of stuff brewing in the Mangiaracina house and it all started this weekend with a good old fashioned clean out.  In order to be productive, we knew that we had to pare this family down to 3 for a few days.  Can you guess who got the boot?

Well, it wasn't Lucy. :)  The little man spent the weekend at Grandma and Grandpa Q's house and had his very first sleep over.  It was a trial run and they all did great.  THANK YOU SO MUCH MOM AND DAD Q!!!!!! 

With James out of picture, we were a family of 3 for two days and we got a LOT accomplished.  Like a lot, A LOT!  So what are we working on?  Well...let me explain.

As James gets older, he seems to be accumulating more and more stuff.  And his stuff is getting bigger and bigger which means it is taking over the living room.  We realize that we need to make better use of the basement and we need to do it now.  

The basement is basically finished.  We just need to put some finishing touches on it before we are open for business down there.  But before we can do anything, we had to clean out. And that is what we did this weekend.  The basement has been a storage area since we moved in.  Actually... it's been more of a dumping ground.  In order to make this space our new family room, we needed to clean out the junk.  

We got started on Saturday after we dropped James off and within an hour, the room looked like this:

We basically had to break down an entire desk/office area that housed all of Ed's crap stuff, clean out the kitchenette that became a storage unit and pull everything out of the cedar closet under the stairs to purge what we no longer need.  It was a lot of work and physical labor, but it felt good to get rid of the junk.

In addition to tackling the basement, we also paid some attention to the attic.  This house does not have a lot of unfinished storage space so we have to make use of every nook and cranny and that includes the attic.  Since moving in, one of our "To Do" items has been to add more planks in the attic and get more stuff up there.  That item was crossed off the list this weekend.  We hit up Lowes and had some wood cut to make the attic more user friendly.  

We were able to put a ton of stuff up there that we don't use on a regular basis which in turn freed up space in the cedar closet in the basement for stuff that we do need access to more often.  

We are not quite ready to start tearing down the walls, but we are in much better shape.  And what's great is that with this clean out, we have a few items to sell on Craigslist to help fund the project.  Already made a quick $200 selling this bad boy:

Anyone in the market for a TV stand?  How about a window AC unit?  Maybe a bookcase or an elfa Shelving System??  Hello?  Bueller...