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What Do You Do When Your Basement and Attic are Full?


My family of five has spent the last several months trying to declutter our home.  We schedule donation pick-ups with a local charitable organization almost every week.  Amazingly, after about 4 months of doing this, it still does not seem like we have made much more than a small dent in our clutter.  We have both an attic and a basement, which are being used completely for storage.  No, we do not have a garage or a shed.  If we did, though, I have no doubt they would both be filled as well.  What we really need is to find inexpensive self storage.  There are so many furniture pieces, among other things, that I would love to use in our future (much larger) home and it would break my heart to part with them.

Over the next month or so, my husband and I will be making it a priority to clear out the basement.  It had once been a finished family room, but it flooded, so we turned it into storage space.  We very much need the extra living space again, since our three children are growing bigger and the five of us are tripping over each other in this tiny townhouse.  We are hoping to turn the basement into a finished play space for the children.  We could put mats down, buy a kick bag for them to practice their taekwondo, and maybe add an air hockey or a ping pong table.

Now we just need to keep that goal in mind and keep chipping away at all the boxes and boxes of stored items we have collected over the past 18 years.  Do you have any tips on how to make this process less painful?