Friday, May 16, 2008

Before and After

Oh, yeah! I remember why I started this blog in the first place! I was organizing and decluttering and wanted to share my accomplishments with all of you. OK, I got a little distracted for a few weeks. But he-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e's another installment in the incredible tale that is my decluttering and organizing adventure.

So Val was taking a shower about four years ago and was holding onto the handicapped bar so she could better reach the shower head, shrimp that she was. Oops. The wall fell off because water had been getting behind the tile for a long time. Good thing it was a lithe youngster for whom the handicapped bar gave out! Seeing as how the tile color scheme was black and blue, we voted to remodel the entire bathroom rather than replace the tiles. Plus, who knew what havoc that water may have wreaked behind the tile?

As part of the remodeling, we put in a laundry chute. Here's the business end of it:



And here's the resulting mess:



Although the lovely laundry chute saved me running down the stairs with baskets full of clothes, and also led to me finding some interesting items among the clothes especially when the kids were younger, I was not happy to have this big pile of mess on the floor. So I put my thinking cap on and came up with this:



And now the floor looks like this:



I got that hanging basket for free from Discovery Toys in my brief insane foray into multi-level marketing. It's been hanging around my basement for quite awhile and I finally found a great use for it! The hardest part of the project was hammering the %$^%#$%^ nails into the floor joists since there was only 8 inches between them and the hammer wanted more space. But, now that little rectangle stays concrete-y and uncluttered just all the time.

Voila!

2 comments:

Stephanie M said...

But sweet Sioux - isn't it hard getting the basket down when you need to wash clothes????

Unknown said...

No, babe, it's very light. One side hangs on while I release the other side. In the extremely rare case of the basket being really full, I just let it go bombs away. It works very very great!