Make Room, Make Room

It seems that, all my life, I've had (a) too little room for my stuff, or (b) too much stuff for the room I have. The problem gets worse with each passing year, even though I've been trying to cull through stuff, because it seems that Susan and I still add more than we eliminate. I have this surreal image of our house suddenly collapsing into the ground, Usher-like, from the weight of an accumulated lifetime of pack-rat-ism.

Recently, though, I decided that I really wanted to remake one of the two rooms in the basement into a usable, liveable space. The basement is largely finished, but it has become a repository for esoteric items that won't fit upstairs, books that have long since overflowed every available bookshelf, burgeoning numbers of CDs and DVDs, etc.

I got a great deal on a large DLP television to replace an older, smaller unit in the basement (I wrote about it a while back when I had to rework the basement wiring to accommodate the power drain caused by printers, TVs, amplifiers, computers, and exercise equipment, so I used that as the lynchpin of the reinvention. I rearranged the furniture to make it more functional, eliminated some furnishings and esoterica that I was tired of stumbling over, and tried to streamline what was there. The result is a very comfortable room for working, watching television, listening to music, or just relaxing.

The cats, who stay in the basement every night, have been intrigued by the changes. Suddenly their space is arranged totally differently, and Anna and Mischa are having a great time exploring the new realm. Tisha, who has been with us through too many moves and rearrangements, doesn't care; she simply finds a place that seems fairly similar to the last place she claimed as her own and settles down there.

Next--a major purge of some books I don't anticipate reading ever again. With boxes of books still on the floor of the other basement room, there's no reason to waste valuable space on books that I won't experience again when there's a chance someone could enjoy the chance to become acquainted with them.