UGH. Dark, dirty, cluttered and unusable

My friend Cory says that the real New Year is actually the first day of school. I am not going to lie: the first day after Labour Day does have fresh start vibes. I think it also helps that in Canada it often feels like fall comes in suddenly between that last week of August and the first week of September. For sure it also has a lot to do with the fact that we spend 14 years in school and even more if you head off to post-secondary school. With every new September, I loved the feeling of the fresh start with every school year. So when I joined the work world and was trudging off to work, I would see all of the kids during Frosh week & made me nostalgic and a bit sad. It felt like that fun time of my life was over and that all I had to look forward to was 40 years of drudgery in the form of a full time job. (SPOILER: thankfully, it didn’t end up like that though!)

When we moved into our house in December 2017, a month later in January 2018 I was diagnosed with PLS. So then came the most chaotic two years of us figuring out disability, managing emotions around disability, figuring out my work situation, dealing with a child who was upset with the move and the urge to TRAVEL RIGHT NOW TO ALL OF THE PLACES BEFORE YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ANYMORE. We did some travelling over the next two years and then found ourselves home-bound – much like the rest of the world – in 2020. Of course, that had its own challenges and while we gardened and had family activities to replace the ones we lost, we never quite unpacked or went through our things like we should have. Our new home had a ton of storage and when the kids outgrew things, we just stuffed it into a box in the back room.

Then this year, for some strange reason, I decided a week before our community garage sale that we would finally, FINALLY go through all of the junk we had stored for the past 6 years. Enlisting the children to help by bribing them, we went through all of the boxes. We sorted, we washed, we donated and we tossed a lot of stuff over that week and in the end we joined in the garage sale, it went well and the children made some pocket cash.

Un(fortunate?)ly, we also discovered that the seal on our toilet had failed and that the toilet had started leaking through the floor. I am glad we caught it when we did because it ended up being a cheap fix but it meant that we had to keep all of the storage out in the main rec room area of the basement while everything dried…and then – in true Tucker fashion – we just left it there.

Then a few stars aligned: the city decided that they would impose a 3-item max on September 30th and at some point the amount of crap the kids would just toss around the basement became out of control. The laundry started seeping out of the laundry room into the main rec area and it was becoming clear that we had lost a lot of things to the giant pile that was growing beside the Eldest’s room. Enough was enough: something needed to be done.

That something came in the form of me, going downstairs. Stairs are typically difficult for me so I don’t usually head down to the basement despite the fact that we had installed a second railing and set up a small home gym last year. I kinda abandoned the home gym though because the lighting was so dark and with the black floors and dark brown walls it was just too depressing to go down there.

So it was clear that we needed to make a more inviting space. The Eldest is having a lot more sleepovers and it was embarrassing to watch them all sneak into her room and shut the door because the rest of the basement was so cluttered. Since we have a projector down there and some couches, I figured it would be nicer if the kids had their own little space to play video games or watch movies.

If we were going to do something with that space, it needed to be before school started and before the garbage restriction – so Labour Day weekend it was!

Last week the Eldest had stopped working and the Youngest was out of camps so we buckled down and sorted through the boxes. In the evening, Mr. Tucker organized them and put what we were keeping back in storage. On Thursday night we headed out and did errands managing to kill many birds with one stone (or one circular trip, as it were): we got school supplies, bought paint, porch dropped some things that I had put up on Buy Nothing, and the rest got dropped off at the charity store (for which we got a 20% off coupon for our next purchase!) all within 1.5 hours! It was glorious to finally see the hard work come to fruition. A couple of hundred dollars more would get us some floor lamps, couch covers and a Chromecast & then we were set: a basement we could use again!

The cost? (all prices in CAD)
$115.24 Couch covers
$158.15 Daylight mimicking lamps
$193.78 Paint & supplies (we could have made this cheaper but I consider the quality combined with the short window of opportunity to be worth just going for it)
$0 Chromecast (paid with a gift card that Mr. Tucker had but originally $39.99+tax)
—-
$467.17 total

But what is really great is being able to use our space again! I am no longer embarrassed to have the Eldest’s friends over and Mr. Tucker are going to design our workout schedule going forward.

Sure, I could have done it for less money and waited for sales on a variety of things. But there is a reason why we have the saying, “strike while the iron is hot.” In most of our days we struggle balancing having the time, energy and space to get larger projects accomplished. So when the stars align and we have able bodies and a 3-day weekend, I am going to eat the cost and have the goal accomplished. It makes no sense for me to wait it out to save $100 if in the end that means 5 more months (or more) of having an unusable space.

BEHOLD! A useable, bright amazing space!