Phew.  I just finished helping my sister clean out her basement.

This was AFTER a large amount of work and getting rid of stuff on my sister’s part (there’s a whole ass bedroom back there)

I know what you’re thinking- some broken Christmas decorations, some piles of outgrown clothes, how bad could it be?  But my sister doesn’t live in a house that was just hers.  She moved into her husband’s grandparents’ house.  They are the 5th generation to live there, which is super cool. How many of us have that much history at our fingertips?

She, however, had a little too much of it.  Literally under her feet.  

Her husband’s grandparents are genuinely lovely people.  His grandpa helped my sister and I build the chicken run when she first got her chickens, and while a lot of men that age are condescending and patronizing especially when helping two women do something so stereotypically masculine, but he was kind and truly helpful.  And she loves them dearly.

But there is one thing that they did that I think was pretty rude.

Her basement is huge.  I am not exaggerating when I say it is bigger than my first house (and possibly my second).  And when my sister moved in it was nearly half full of boxes, old furniture, a whole ass pool table, and just the general detritus of four generations of people.  When I say, full, I mean packed nearly to the ceiling- in the picture below, the area past the second pillar was not traversable.

She has done a lot of sorting and discarding work in the eight or so years since they moved in, but in that time she’s also had four kids, gotten a masters in nursing, worked full time, and become essentially a doctor in our small home town.  She hasn’t had a lot of spare time.  

And since I desperately needed some before and after pictures, I volunteered to drive 6 hours to help her cross the finish line.  

You can see two of the FOUR armchairs here, as well as the awesome orange patterned couch.

Do you want to know what she had in her basement when I got there?  Of course you do.  This is not, by any means, an exhaustive list:

• a pool table (a really nice one, they’re keeping that)
• a whole ass kitchen (which is common in the area, they are used for canning)
• Four.  Yes FOUR armchairs.  There may have been 5 actually I don’t remember.
• A couch (only one though).
• The worlds oldest treadmill (which is super cool, it’s completely manual, I may have brought it home with me)
• An equally old exercize bike.
• TWELVE KITCHEN CHAIRS.  From three different dining sets.  
• Two of the matching tables from the 3 dining sets.
• Eleventy billion boxes of tax documents from before they took over.
• An entire packed suitcase, like neatly packed, really nice clothes but circa maybe 1970?
• An entire antique bedroom set
• Another bed frame.
• A box spring.
• A box of teacups and saucers labeled “from Phyllis’s cupboard” (Phyllis was her husband’s great great grandmother… this was actually a pretty cool find)
• A entire antique ice chest full of moldy tablecloths.
• So. Many. Readers Digest condensed books.  Like I love books, but those are not the type I like to come across.

This treadmill tho…

Bedroom revealed!