Jul 23 The Reveal

One of Allie and my projects for the summer was to turn my train wreck of a basement into the Life as a Zebra office.

If you had gone into my basement two weeks ago, you most likely would have gotten swallowed up into one of the many black holes, never to be seen again.  It’s funny because I actually hate clutter.  If you were to see the rest of my house, you would notice that it’s actually pretty clutter free.  But the basement has always been a different story.  It became a dumping ground; a space we never used except to dump our stuff.  Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

The crap stuff included 8 years of teaching materials interspersed with home gadgets, MSU work, Montessori graduate work, furniture, zebra shirts, silent auction materials, invisible illness awareness materials, banners, silent auction donations, boxes of files, and straight up junk.  It was a pretty big task to undertake but after a lot of talking about it, Allie got on board.  I promised her that the basement would become her baby, and I would follow her lead. She was good with that, so we set to work.

The first couple of days were all about clearing out the junk…throwing junk away, hauling junk to Goodwill, and organizing the junk I wanted to keep. Then came the first of many shopping trips for supplies, storage, and organizational materials.  We ended up finishing way under budget, because low and behold, under all of that mess was a lot of materials that we were actually able to put to use.  Once we got everything out that we wanted, it was time to get ourselves into major organizational mode.  The theme throughout the project was, “Everything must have a home AND make sense.”

I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking, but I am really happy with how it turned out.  It is now an actual calm and quiet zebra office and work space, with so many personal and meaningful touches that make me smile.  I love having that baby sister of mine around.

 The Before Pictures (AKA “Hot Mess”):

And The After Pictures: