Cleaning it Up: Basement Utility Storage

One of the bigger projects that Matt was particularly wanting to tackle this year was our utility area at the bottom of the basement stairs.  Our basement ends up holding all sorts of random storage (such as our pantry - which has much more food and much few canning jars than 6 years ago) because there is just no other space.  And that includes all the random household items like light bulbs, batteries, extra/heavy cleaning supplies, etc. 

This project was on my 23 in 2023 list but then sped along a bit because we had 3 basement floods over 10 days in the spring.  In 17+ years in our house our basement had only flooded one other time, when our water heater burst over a decade ago.  We're pretty sure we resolved the leaks and haven't had any problems in many months.  But that did mean we tore out everything that was there earlier than expected.

We've lived with some similar version of this for nearly our whole time in this house.

This was almost entirely Matt's project.  I gave some design input and then did the final organizing but he did all the real work.  He was especially interested in including space for his after work clothes change.  Ever since COVID he's been changing out of his scrubs in the basement (where the laundry is) to avoid germ spreading through the whole house (regardless of COVID...working at a hospital exposes him to all sorts of germs).  So adding in that area and a place to put on and off his shoes, ala Mr. Rogers, was part of it.  

I was very excited for how much better we'd be able to organize all those miscellaneous household items down here, instead of the hodgepodge we'd been living with nearly as long as we've had this house.  

Looking back at the before pictures...even I forgot how much of a mess it was.  This took Matt MANY hours but is so much more functional and aesthetically pleasing, it's the fanciest part of our basement!

The pull-out shelves on the left, under the bench, are for mine & Matt's "dirty" shoes.  The ones we use for yard work, mowing (Matt, not me), etc.  Luke's are in the mudroom because that's as much as we can get him to put them away and since he does most of our mowing...we'll let that go.  Matt has a variety of his project clothes down there too.  The stuff that apparently isn't dirty enough to wash but too clean to be put away.  I don't know, I only have my dirty work sweatshirt down there.

The really fun part for me were the drawers.  Matt customized those so that we could fit taller things in the bottom one and then have plenty of space in the others.  I found a bunch of storage baskets on clearance at Hobby Lobby in the spring and stocked up on enough to organize all of them.  Note, I did NOT clean our cleaning supplies before taking pictures so please excuse the dust.  Starting on the bottom:

This drawer Matt made specifically tall enough to hold our bucket.  I bought that bucket over a decade ago to use with the floor scrubber thing I used on our kitchen floors.  I've been using a steam mop for awhile but still have the bucket.  I guess it's a handy thing to hold on to??  And that's a bottle of vinegar inside of it, for lack of a better place to put it.  The rest are special car cleaning things, headlight shiners, and lesser used cleaning supplies like bleach.

Organizing the drawers was just trial and error to see how everything fit.  The mass of black in the back are all trash bags I bought from a school fundraiser...and haven't even touched 2 years later.  We don't go through a lot of trash bags.  Then some extra hydrogen peroxide, extra rubbing alcohol, my extra laundry detergent sheets, a variety of pest control items, and window plastic sealer things which we haven't used in a few winters.  Should we still have those???  Maybe not.

Here's some electrical things - extra light bulbs, all of the rechargable batteries, and then a variety of things for holding things together: clothes pins, command strips, velcro tie things, etc.  I like that none of these drawers are packed which makes opening them a little bit easier, just more soothing.  Plus, space to rearrange, if needed.

Top drawer is more electrical - a basket of extension cords, a basket of flashlights (that was especially satisfying to put together, we had had them ALL over the house), a basket of various plug things. Childproofing things in the back (do we still need those??? I don't know, there's a lot I don't know in this post, apparently), and extra contact paper just because this is where it fit. 

Please excuse the dark pictures, the basement doesn't get the best light!  We hung back up my battery organizer, for the non-rechargeable batteries.  The larger open shelf has bins for collecting batteries to be recycled.  There's also my sharps container for the bi-weekly injection I do for my RA.  The top has an empty basket, the larger one where I recently put my new steamer (will it stay there?? I don't know) (it's the same steamer the whole internet seems to have and it's been very satisfying to use, I need to get back to it! Aff. Link.), and then a roll of heavy duty liner which doesn't fit in that basket but that's there it's been for now!

A good before and after!  HUGE improvement over what we had!  The old wire shelves were constantly falling apart and now everything is sorted so much better too.  I didn't quite see the point when Matt started talking about this last year but I'm very glad he did and then got it done.  It's made a huge difference in our basement organizing.