Those Bags Sure Suck!

Today I've been working on decluttering my basement. Rick and I decided to try to finish the majority of the basement, just in case one of our kids gets married and they need to live with us. A-hem. Anyway, my basement is the biggest pit - just really junky. I'm not going to take ALL of the blame, but I will admit to at least half of it. Not only does this basement have an accumulation of junk, it is FULL of hand-me-down furniture, old cabinets, our deck furniture, etc. We can hardly walk through the rooms. My poor son, Michael, is actually living down there! (I would post pictures of some of the rooms, but Rick would kill me. Literally - kill me.)

We started in the storage room, mostly because we had to put our Christmas stuff back into that room. Several years ago, Rick made these big shelves for our storage room, and they were in serious need of fixing - so Rick made them much more sturdy and we went through everything on the shelves and decluttered. It was fun. We threw away quite a bit of old stuff, I took a full load to the D.I., and then put the rest back on the shelves. It looks nicer now.

My son, Michael, mentioned that I should get some of the bags that you put stuff in, and then suck the air out. So I did. WOW!!! I love those bags! Whenever I've seen them on TV, I just haven't been able to figure out how in the world they would work. It seems to me that if you have a bunch of blankets stuffed into this bag, and then you stick the end of a vacuum in the hole, it would suck up the blankets! But, that's not what happened. It worked beautifully. Here are the pictures to prove it...
This little bundle has 3 large blankets in it! So cool.

This one showed the three different bags I filled. That long, flat one is filled with 6 pillows and some bedding. The one in the back has 5 pillows and a blanket in it.

ALL of that stuff on one shelf! SWEET!


Now for the craft room... or CRAP room, as Rick calls it. :-)