Love Sweep

We're crazy. Yup, that's us right there. Why else would two people spend their Valentine's Day clearing out and scrubbing the dark recesses of their basement? Perhaps the same two people who also spent one fine Friday night taking sledgehammers to the soffits in their kitchen, while drinking and listening to country music until 2 AM.

I wonder what our neighbors think of us.

Anyways, back to the topic.

We've been neglecting our storage room and laundry room for months now, as there have been many other emergencies that have topped our To Do List ever since we were handed the keys to this baby. Although we'd been dreading the Great Sweep for quite some time, we were tired of squeezing past the junk to reach the washer, searching high and low for tools and painting supplies all over the house, and most of all avoiding going down there because it was gross and possibly full of spiderwebs. Ew. (okay, that was mostly me.)

So we threw on some tunes and got to work cleaning and organizing the last two neglected spaces in the house.

As you can see, they really needing a sprucing-up. So, we got down and dirty scrubbing and organizing.

And roundabouts 5 hours later, there was a definite improvement:

Big improvement, eh? Okay, so maybe it's not absolutely breathtaking (yet), but at least the laundry room area was clean and organized. We removed two of the pegboard doors directly above the washer and dryer, for easier access and to spice up the laundry a little (I'm sure you're wondering what in the world I'm talking about right now) but you'll just have to hold on until we get there. There is a laundry room remodel in the future for us, I tell you, but it's gonna be awhile (since we are really the only people that use that room).

Getting the laundry room sqeaky clean felt great, and we even managed to open up more room down there by organizing  everything we had. Now most of the shelves down there are completely empty (a good thing to have!), and here's the goods we stashed in the others:

Our toilet paper backup stash, paper towels, backup garbage bags, baking soda, matches and heavy duty hand and carpet cleaner.

In this area I decided to store our decorating supplies, like house flags, centerpieces, candles and candleholders and vase fillers. It was the perfect spot for these supplies, because now there's tons more space in the hall closet, where these were stored previously.

As for the storage room, we managed to completely clean and organize the work bench (yes, we actually 409'd it and scrubbed it till that baby shined!). And we completely reorganized and repacked the storage stuff in the storage room (oh, and that big white blank thing on the left in the photo below is a huge canvas that one day, I shall paint... ).

One more thing we did: we added a fancy pants light in our landry room, because I was itchin' to try out the cheap and chic  DIY light fixture from Young House Love. Of course, ours wasn't nearly as simple or easy as theirs (isn't that how it always goes?) so we had to rig it and do a few modifications of our own. But in the end it worked out, and I think it looks much better than a plain bulb, and adds a bit of ambiance to our little laundry room.

So what do you guys think? Can you even tell a difference, or does it look the same (please say you can tell a little bit of a difference, haha!)? Any huge projects that need a good cleaning out or reorganizing that you've been putting off for while, too? Or maybe you spent a holiday doing something home-improvement related. I'd love to know!

Have a fantastic Friday and a great weekend!