Whole Room Organizational Challenge Completed

Good grief - the time it took to load all these pictures took nearly as long as it took to clean the basement! LOL

As I stated in my other post, I've been working on two projects for Laura who writes at I'm An Organizing Junkie. This challenge was a month long. I chose to tackle my kitchen closet and the basement. This post in about the basement. To be honest, it is not as completed as I had hoped but MUCH progress was made and what IS left should not be a problem to deal with.

So, Laura's asked us to answer the following questions in our finale:

1. What was the hardest part of the challenge for you and were you able to overcome it?
Due to my ADD, I was completely overwhelmed by the whole task...thus, explaining how it got that way in the first place! So, the hardest thing was finding a way to dividing this up into manageable, smaller pieces without getting frustrated, discouraged, or distracted. Luckily, the basement is kinda divided into "zones": two finished rooms, one large unfinished space, and the laundry area. So, I tried to stick with one at a time.

2. Tell us what kind of changes/habits you have put into place in order for your area/room to maintain its new order?
Well, this challenge was more about what we will using the space for. The main motivator? The one room that was a guest room but will now become a homeschool classroom in the fall. The other motivator was it would be wonderful to actually USE my stuff now that I knew what I had and where it was located.

Our biggest problem (other than organizational! LOL) was that we hadn't really defined what we wanted for each space. Once the first room was designated at a classroom and the unfinished side was "storage", the second room's issue became how to organize what remained: boat materials, office stuff and teacher stuff. With these "use designations", we have "zones" now where stuff goes now so it'll be easier to keep it together.

3. What did you do with the "stuff" you were able to purge out of your newly organized space?
Good grief! The garbage men are absolutely HATING us at this point! LOL I've also been using Freecycle, Ebay, and Paperbookswap.com to clean out the majority of our unused, until-recently-unseen stuff.

4. What was the biggest lesson you learned from this experience?
Everything needs somewhere to go. And, everyone in this house needs to put away their "toys" when they are done with them! LOL

5. Now that you have completed the PROCESS, do you think having and keeping your space organized will make a difference in your life?
Most definitely. I'll be finishing up our new classroom over the summer and embarking on my (and Flicka's, of course) first experiment with homeschooling this fall! I'll also be able to practice more of the craft and home skills I've been learning now that I have the space to do so. This cost me no money, only time. And, as a result, I actually MADE money, got free books, and blessed several people in my community! Then, I can make more money and/or save our money by using those crafty skills even more.

Now, the unveiling:

The "guest room" before:


The guest room after:

The bed will be coming out of there next.

The unfinished storage area before:

And, then after:

Those remaining tubs and piles are things of Da Hubby's he needs to go through yet. And,that bookshelf has all my craft supplies now...all in one place and LABELED! Oooooo!

The second finished room before:

And, after: