S is for Storage n’ Stuff

***I’m going to try to post something every day in the month of November. I definitely may not- it’s just a goal and I’m not going to be upset about missing it! Hopefully in my spare time, I can come up with a post per day. My prompts are going to be the letters of the alphabet. I will write about something that starts with the day’s letter- think Sesame Street meets the blogsphere. Of course there are more days in the month of November than there are letters in the alphabet. I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it!***

This post is sponsored by the tears that streamed down my face as I gazed at my too full linen closet. I am not actually super prone to tears and have to say that the sorry state of my linen closet bringing me to tears is a new one :). But tears they were for FULL was my linen closet and numerous were the items that I wanted to add to it. Several forces came to play that have resulted in too many linens. But, to back up...

We’ve lived in our house 18 years. I know that is not a huge number of years- you hear of people living 50+ years in a home or couples living at least 35 years in the same house. Eighteen is not near the top of the list of years to live in one place. Yet, it isn’t a tiny amount of years either. Several of my friends have moved geographically several times or moved to different houses within an area and one thing those moves all have in common is that the person or family moving got rid of a ton of stuff each time they moved.

We’ve gotten rid of a lot of stuff as well. I mean, I don’t have any baby items besides keepsakes, I’ve gotten rid of decor that  we no longer use, furniture that we’ve replaced, etc. But we’ve held on to a lot of stuff and the biggest reason is that we have the space at the house to store it. Our house is probably mid size for a fairly prosperous Midwestern suburban town. The main level of our house consists of a laundry room, half bath, eat- in kitchen, formal dining, living room (ours is study) and a family room. The rooms aren’t huge but they aren’t small either and a full basement sits underneath, less than half of which is finished. So we have a lot of storage space. And we fill it. If we had a larger house with a bigger basement, my guess is that we’d be the owners of more stuff that was stored in our bigger space.

We haven’t had a dedicated guest room but we do/ will now: Jacob’s room. It still bears testament to a teenage boy having lived there with various sport team paraphernalia/ decorations in the room. We plan to change the space into an actual guest room. But, for now, it has Jacob’s bed and no Jacob so it is a guest room of sorts. When Jacob lived here, when guests spent the night, they’d spend the night in the basement on a blow up mattress (if your goal is to have guests not spend too many nights, giving them a bed of a blow up mattress just might do the trick, lol. Not that that was ever our goal. I’m just saying...). It made sense to have a space in the basement to store sheets, pillows, blankets, etc. We use a piece of furniture that was once a TV cabinet turned toy storage turned linen storage area for the basement.

Having two spaces for linen- a linen closet upstairs and a space in the basement was ostensibly good but the reality was it meant that I never knew exactly what we all had (since linens were store in two places) and that it was easy to justify keeping everything (we have plenty of storage for linens). Of course keeping everything culminated in my tears the other day ;(. We had SO MUCH STUFF and both linen storage areas were full beyond capacity. 

It’s fairly easy to justify keeping numerous blankets and towels on hand- at least, it was not hard for me. The What -if’s kept me from throwing old things out. What if we lost electricity and needed a lot of blankets to keep warm? What if we had a huge leak or spill and needed many towels to sop up messes/ water?

The what- if’s combined with having two spaces where sheets, pillows and blankets were stored led to an overabundance of such items. To try to maintain some order, I organized each space (the upstairs linen closet and the basement linen storage) and threw out some really old pieces of linens and plan to get rid of excess pillows and comforters. One other problem that I’m facing now with getting rid of things we don’t need are the ages of the kids: as they are getting older and established with adult places of residence, it’s temping to keep items at home so that the kids can take what we are no longer using rather than have to buy new items. But I am still getting rid of some stuff. I just have too much of it and I don’t ever want to be brought to tears again due to too much stuff in the linen closet! 

Our basement storage for linens and a few others

 

The whole top area was for a TV. Donnie added the first shelf when we no longer used for an entertainment device to make it useful for storage.