Last time I cleaned our basement cage was summer 2012, and it looked like this:
Nice and tidy. Somehow between summer 2012 and February 2014 this happened:
So I spent 4 hours yesterday moving pretty much everything out of the cage, vacuuming the space with my new shop vac, and laying down our old living room rug for a nice, homey feel [I realize the basement could flood and ruin the rug, but hopefully we’d have enough time to move it – and a few other things – to higher ground before the water reached our cage]. Then I moved everything† back in, with a new layout:
The biggest change I made was moving the 2 wooden IKEA shelving units from the left wall of the cage to the back, so I could free up room under the light for my workbench. Now I just need to build me a workbench! For now our old coffee table is a place holder.
My Shop-Vac has been a great little purchase – it sucked up tons of dust and some small debris from the basement cage floor, and sucked up a ton of cobwebs from the rafters. Don’t ask me why it took me 6 months to actually open the box and use it… I have no good answer.
† I actually didn’t move everything back in – I weeded out a lot of stuff, which will go either out on our curb this spring [we have an awesome curb – every time we put something out it’s usually gone before we’re even back inside‡], or we’ll sell it on Craigslist. You can see some of it through the mesh cage wall in the pic on the right. Hooray for [early] spring cleaning!
‡ Last summer we put out a set of 4 IKEA chairs and as I set the last one down, a man in a station wagon came screeching to a halt, kicked his son out of the car, told him to walk the rest of the way home, and loaded the chairs in. LOL!!!
There was another Great Basement Clean in 2015:
And another in 2018:
