Hoarders...of sorts

Do you ever watch the show Hoarders? I admit...sometimes we get sucked into it and are just amazed. One of the most memorable ones we've seen was about a man who hoarded books. He had tens of thousands of books in his house and they could hardly walk through it anymore.

Depending on what projects we're doing in the house, and how busy our work schedules are...I totally feel like we're hoarders when I go into the unfinished part of our basement. That's where Michael keeps all of his toolboxes and it's a make-shift workshop. Plus, we have extra furniture and exercise equipment sitting down there that doesn't fit anywhere else. It's also where my laundry room is and on laundry days there can be 4 different laundry baskets in the mix too.

It's great when it's organized but when we're in the middle of a project and all the tools are out, and stuff is moved around...there seems to be endless piles of stuff everywhere! It's overwhelming!

Last weekend we took some time to clean it out to move more stuff in from the garage. Since it's gotten cold now, the garage workshop area is too cold so extra tools move inside. :)

Thankfully we were able to get rid of a LOT that shouldn't have been there anyway. When we moved into our house, the past homeowners left all of their paint (along with a fridge, and a bunch of trash that we didn't want and had to pay to get rid of). We never had a chance to go through all the paint they left, until now. We also had lots of paint cans from our previous house (that we still own and rent out) but the colors aren't even used in that house anymore. It was definitely time for it all to go!

This was the pile of paint we were able to get rid of:

 But sadly, this is the pile of what had to stay:

Can you believe that we need this much paint? Everything here is currently being used in our house or is stain/varnish for the hardwood floors. What were we thinking by deciding to paint every room in the house a different color?

It's crazy to see how much 'stuff' we own that's just used on the house. (tools, paint, wood, extra doors, extra cabinets, etc.) Although, the nice part about it all is that we basically have our own hardware store. Take caulking for instance, if we need it...we've got it.

And right now, even though the basement is kind of a mess, it's a beautiful mess to me! This is my almost-finished office/craft room:

There are a lot of details left to do, but I can already picture it done in my head and I can't WAIT!