Basement organization

[pregcurious]

Hey PS,

I've been organizing my small basement for the last 3.5 years. When I moved, my basement was completely filled with stuff from a 10 x10 ft storage room, and stuff from my previous house that did not have a basement. Flash forward to today, and the finished part of my basement (~14 x 20 ft) is now mostly clear of boxes, and set up as a general purpose room with a couch, toy storage, round table for crafts, bookshelves, etc.

So here's the catch...I still have long wall of utility shelves (24.5 ft) filled with stuff on one side of the room into a hallway, and wood shelves and stuff stacked on the other side of the hallway (13 ft). That's a total of ~37.5' feet of shelves filled with stuff!

Do you have any ideas or inspiration for going to the next step? Anyone have a beautifully organized basement that still stores stuff? I am trying to only keep things that will be used in the next 5 years, or are highly sentimental (photos).

I see beautifully organized basements on HGTV, but is that realistic? To reach this goal, I am thinking of storing all my things in clear plastic boxes, eventually. The only things not destined for a plastic box are large items (luggage, doll house, rollaway twin bed), or rarely used (but useful!) kitchen appliances and accessories for which I still have the original boxes.

The shelves and some of the boxes I have look like the ones below.

Preg

 

[asscherisme]

If you are willing to lose about 2 or 3 feet along a whole wall, build a wall to wall closet with nice doors. When I bought my house it came with a fantastic triple doored closet, it runs the length of an entire wall, has nice oak doors, looks great and has TONS of storage.

 

[smitcompton]

Hi,

First-- if you plan on staying in this house, I would get rid of those empty boxes you mentioned.

Second-- sort out some things that could be put in the garage. I have those shelves in my garage. Tools for garden, paper products ect.
I love aschermes suggestion of doors--louvre ones might be inexpensive. I would put them on one side only. Open space on other so it visually doesn't look crowded.

Annette.

 

[pregcurious]

Thanks, asscherisme and smitcompton. I like the general idea of making a wall of closets. I'll have to think more about that. I did put a hospital track on the ceiling, have a wall of navy curtains to cover the shelves. It looks okay.

The boxes, unfortunately, are not empty. They have the original kitchen accessories/appliances in them.

I guess I just have to get rid of more stuff :

 

[PierreBear]

Hello! I'm not sure how much you want to invest in organization as you mentioned it was in your basement. Our home didn't come with a master closet (yes very strange.. just wire shelving) and we eventually went with a permanent solution. There are options like California Closets and the Container Store has a department doing this as well if you want something custom going from wall to wall if Ikea doesn't have shelving units that fit the size you need. Good luck with the organizing/purging/discovering old memories!

 

[Arcadian]

I wish I had a basement again....

What we did was have shelves attached to the concrete walls of our basement (about 3 of them). We had a very large basement though, which when we moved, was hellish to clean out! If you're going to reorganize. you may also want to take that opportunity to also do some serious basement cleaning. If you have a box that hasn't been opened in 5 years, think about how necessary it would be to actually keep the contents.