31 Day Organizational Challenge - First Update

Last Friday I showed you my disaster of a furnace room.  If you missed that post you can see it in its entirety here.  Now it's time for an update on my 31 Day Organizational Challenge with Organizing Junkie!

Mr. P and I were able to get quite a bit done in the past week.  Here is the before photos from the left side of the door as soon as you walk in.

And here are the after photos!

This area is for all of my holiday decorations.  Kind of looks like Christmas threw up in there!

I went through all of my Christmas decorations and I really did get rid of a lot that I don't use.  I emptied all the bins that they were in and I bought new storage bins for them.  There were two reasons that I decided to purchase new storage containers.

One,  I knew that we had to put shelving in that area to get everything up off the floor.  In looking for shelving that would fit the larger bins, I found that everything was either too tall (there is a heating duct that goes right through the middle of this area) or it was too expensive.  This is what the old containers looked like:

The new containers were less than $5.00 each at Walmart and I was able to fit two of them on each shelf.  The new shelving units were only $50.00 each (we bought 3), they snapped together easily and hold a lot of weight.

The second reason I decided to buy new containers is because the old ones were too big for me to lift by myself.  Whenever I wanted to decorate anything I had to wait for someone else to come home to carry the container upstairs for me.  Now I can do it myself and not have to worry about anyone hurting themselves trying to carry awkward bins up a flight of stairs.

This area has worked out great!  I was even able to find enough room to bring in all my Halloween decorations that were being stored in the laundry room and put them on the shelves.  All the containers got some nice, new labels and now I know where everything is.

Mr. P put some hooks into the walls to hang the wreaths so that they don't get damaged.

I even hung a wreath on the back of the door and found a spot to store my do-dad for hanging outside lights.  I've lost it countless times so Mr. P made me one out of copper pipe which is there too.

Now for the right side of the door that used to look like this:

And now after!

This is my "outdoor" section of the furnace room.  The new shelves now hold coolers, outside Christmas lights, gardening supplies, outdoor decorations and a couple of tackle boxes.  Everything is easy to find.  I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to store bikes in the basement but they have now been taken outside to the storage shed where they belong.

A lot of the mess was helped by stacking some of the chairs in the corner.  These wicker chairs are not used too often but I love having them for entertaining.

I set up a large plastic container to use for BBQ storage.  It holds things like utensils, wood chips, charcoal and anything else that is used for BBQing.

I got rid of several coats that were hanging in the basement and took 3 spring coats to the upstairs closet in the hopes that spring will be making an appearance soon!

The blue chairs and the black chairs will go outside when the weather warms up.  There is a large, green table behind them that we use when we host large parties.  It was leaning in front of the shelving further into the room but it was blocking everything on the shelves.  It is out of the way against this wall.

We also managed to get some of the shelves on the right side of the room cleared off.  Here's the before.

And here's the after.

As you can see from the floor there is still a lot more work to go but we are making great strides!

The last thing that I wanted to show you was what Mr. P did to organize all the fishing poles.  He put a couple of hooks into the overhead beams and strung a couple of bungee cords between them.  He then tucked the poles up into the ceiling rafters, out of the way.

It's a long post today because we did a lot of work!  But it was so worth it!  I'm looking forward to organizing all my paint supplies this coming week along with a few other things.  We seem to be on track to finishing this project by the end of March!

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