We have big plans, you all. Big plans.

Big plans for before the baby comes.

But, until we start to make some progress on said plans, I’m not sure they’ll get done before the baby gets here. I think we just need momentum. Right now, our momentum is pulling us toward the couch at the end of the day while we relax and waste time watching bad TV. I need it to be warm so I’m more motivated to get out from underneath my blankets and into the garage to work.

But eventually, we want to tackle the baby’s room. And that means we need to move the guest room downstairs to our basement. Which means we need to do some major cleaning/sorting/garage sale planning to get the room emptied out. I mean, seriously, this doesn’t look like a very inviting guest room, does it?

Here, come sleep on our boxes! (To be fair, not all of these are our boxes.)

Or maybe on this pile of “baby stuff” that needs to be sorted and gone through?

But, in addition to complaining about the amount of work that needs to be done in our basement, I figure I should also talk about how much has been done down there, largely thanks to my mom, who came up one day to help me get it all cleaned out.

If you’ll think back a couple months, it looked like this right before Christmas:

 

Or this:

 

 

And aside from the trim being attached to the walls now (upstairs), everything else looked exactly the same when she arrived to help me whip the space back into something usable. Newspaper, sawhorses, cardboard, tarps. It looked like the house in Home Alone 2.

Luckily, my mom pitched in big time and lent her energy to her pregnant and tired daughter to get it whipped into shape. Now, we’re using that space as a makeshift guest room again.

Much better, right?

I know. she’s the best. She’s going to come help me with the rest of the house, too, she just may not have agreed to it yet. And my sister, she’s good at organizing a bunch of junk into something livable. Between the three of us, I’m sure we can manage to get the bed into that room before Beanie gets here, right?

We got this part of the basement back looking how it did before we turned it into a painting station. Remember this?

Anyway, we also bought a second hand couch for the basement, you may have noticed in the photo above. We have high hopes of actually using the space down there… someday.

For now, it’s in a little makeshift living area for the little makeshift basement “apartment.” It even has a tiny TV (the one I had in college) that doesn’t work except to play DVDs since it isn’t hooked up to anything. But still.

My mom was laughing the couch was too close to the fireplace, and it is, but since we won’t be using that fireplace, I figure it doesn’t really matter, does it? It gives us more room to walk between it and the bed.

And of course, the “apartment” has a ping pong table instead of a kitchen. And no shower or bathtub and a ton of boxes…but it still reminds me of a little tiny apartment. Sorta. Okay, I’m getting off topic, here. Back to what needs to be done in the basement. (Answer: everything.)

And yes, I want to paint all the trim. No decision yet on if we’re going to de-popcorn the ceiling yet like we did upstairs. I’d like to, but I don’t want the mess, or the task of repainting the ceiling. Makes my shoulders hurt just thinking about it. It isn’t that we can’t do it…it’s just that I can’t decide if I want to do it. Or if Wyatt will let me do it. He’s on team “Let’s Leave it As Is.”

The little bathroom also needs some work if we want to really transition this space into something more usable. For starters, it’s the darkest room in our house. I didn’t even know the toilet and sink were blue until after we bought the house and moved it because it was so dark I couldn’t tell.

We won’t be tackling a big renovation in this bathroom this year before Beanie makes his/her debut in July, but we do plan to spruce it up a bit. Maybe add a lamp? Or something that would counteract the step down ceiling that makes it feel like a black hole. Imagine trying to put on makeup in this bathroom. Sheesh.

I did add a basket of towels and such for the last guest we had staying down there, but I’d rather have a shelf with some actual storage someone could put a suitcase or something on in they needed to.

 

And now that I’ve shown you our deep, dark, messy basement, and everything that needs to be done down there, it’s your turn to tell me what areas in your house need to be organized. Because yes, organizing needs to happen in all your houses, too, right?

Ideas on how to use this space? We have some thoughts, but I’m undecided. At night, when I can’t sleep, I rearrange the furniture in the basement in my mind, so I can use some new ideas to swirl around in there.