moving day - hoarders

What happens when you move all your belongings from a 2100 sq ft home to a 1000 sq ft home?

You give the impression that you have become hoarders.

Like this:

I stood outside the house directing our awesome friends that helped us move. Lots of our things went downstairs. We thought we had done pretty good moving some things ahead of time and stacking them neatly, but after many, many times saying, "downstairs" to our movers, any sense of organization went out the window.

Let's add this to the mix - Brenden is staying with us for a few months (not in the original plan), so his belongings are scattered about. And Alex and Jett were visiting from Idaho, so they also needed some space. Crazy!

As we knew we needed to renovate our kitchen, lots of extra kitchen stuff ended up in the basement, along with all decor and accessories for the entire house. Add that to the normal basement things - book shelves (and boxes of books), crafty stuff, furniture and extra furniture, trunks and a ping pong table -  things got out of control fast!

Um, what can I say?

Here is the laundry room / food storage / exercise area of the basement after Alex, Lauren and David emptied the 492 boxes of food back onto the shelves. It was actually about as bad as the other side of the basement not long before this photo. They escaped the moving chaos and got some organizing therapy in. What a huge help!

From the laundry room looking back to the other side of the storage area. In the back is a nice big closet, filled with buckets of wheat on the left side and home improvement supplies on the right. 

Things could not stay like this for long. We started emptying boxes onto shelves, editing out furniture and home decor stuff that was not staying and organizing what was left, and have made some huge improvements. That always feels good. 

Trying to shake that "hoarder" identity!