Cleaning Out the Dreaded Basement
We all float down here....
Originally published on Medium on 16 February 2024
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a house in possession of a big basement must be in want of stuff to fill it.
My husband and I have been married for 34 years, and we have seven children. Twelve years ago, we moved from a 2200-square-foot house to one with 3400 square feet. Not counted in that larger square footage was the huge unfinished basement, a rarity in Southern California.
Slowly but surely, we managed to fill up all that storage space. School papers, old clothes, outgrown toys, holiday decorations, sports equipment — the list goes on and on. Getting rid of extra stuff is always appealing in theory, but when you have the space to keep it out of sight and avoid dealing with it, any purging of it tends to fall off the to-do list for months at a time.
But now, as we get ready for our move to France, it’s time to make decisions about what we’re keeping and what we’re letting go. And I’ve been dreading tackling the basement.
For one thing, it was a huge job. But the much bigger problem was that I knew opening those boxes and facing the contents would be hard emotional work. I was right. I didn’t want to face winnowing down decades’ worth of mementos and keepsakes. It wasn’t just stuff from our married life, either; both my husband and I had several boxes from our childhoods, things we (and our parents before us) have been carting around for 50 years.
This week, it was time to gird our loins and get after it. We brought all the boxes out of the dark and into the sunshine of our side yard. We spread out a picnic blanket and got to work. We had several places things could go — bins for things we were keeping, boxes for things we were donating, and big, black trash bags for things we were tossing.
I made a bin for each child in which I put the best of their schoolwork along with class photos, awards, and other memorabilia. We’ll give our adult children their boxes the next time we see them. We have three medium-sized bins of our own memories — mainly letters and photos — that will travel across the ocean with us (all of which we’re also scanning so they’re doubly safe and more easily shareable).
The rest has been taken away, either by the local veterans’ association for donation or to the landfill. (Sorry, planet; I plead guilty. I’ll work harder at not accumulating so much stuff in the first place.)
It took two solid days working until sunset. A few tasks linger, but the bulk of the work is done. I’d been worried that I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to so many tangible reminders of past experiences, but I realized that most of it wasn’t serving us any longer. What a relief.
We still have several closets to get through, but I’m more confident now that we’ve faced the most emotionally taxing part of the process. We’ve come through it lighter, wiser, and more equipped for what lies ahead.
The emotional labor aspect of this is something I didnt expect to think about today but it makes total sense. Its one thing to throw out old sports gear, but sifting through childhood mementos is a different beast entirely. When I helped my parents downsize a few years back, we kept way more than we should've simply becuase we couldn't make the call on what to let go in the moment.