Gravity + vacuum + matter = my basement

Four and a half years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. It took us until we were in our forties, but we saved and managed our lives until we were able to realize this goal.

The house is nothing special in terms of architecture, location, or size, but it's a good house--solid and strong, built to last, and in a safe neighborhood. The house was a step up for us in terms of space. We gained quite a bit of square footage compared to the house we had been renting for years. The basement is 70% finished, although, most of it is a man cave extravaganza of knotty pine, dark linoleum-like floors, a wet bar, and a big space that just had to be for a pool table. There are two "bedrooms" down there, but I can't imagine anyone using them. We call those areas "the bedrooms for very bad children."

When we moved into the house, we had great plans for how we would use the basement. There was to be a home gym, a reading corner, and an area for extra guest space (sofa bed, closet, TV, sitting space) should we need it in addition to the actual guest room. We planned to paint the knotty pine so the basement would look less cave-like. With about 1,000 square feet of pristine, finished, open space, the possibilities were endless.

As we moved in, we realized that the clean, open lines of a mid-century ranch house did not allow for the little collections of things that we had tucked in the built-in shelves and nooks of the 1926 Craftsman bungalow we were moving out of. Whatever we didn't have room for went into the basement. Too many books, no bookshelves--basement. Vintage furniture that was downright fabulous in the old homes we previously inhabited had no place in the new living room--basement. Bicycles, sporting goods, out-of-season clothes, wrapping paper, wedding gowns and reception accouterments, newly acquired wooden lockers, an armoire, and crates of holiday decorations--basement.

At first, it crept up on us so slowly, we didn't even notice that the previously empty basement was filling with excess bits and pieces of our life. Eventually, the truth was inescapable. The basement was full.

We don't use the basement much other than for laundry and repairing things at the workbench. Recently, though, it became obvious that I needed a workspace to accommodate the rapidly growing nonprofit that has, until now, been housed in the dining room. In order to create a space, I had to clear a space. A lot of space. And so it is that I have been slaving away in the dungeon for a week.

I have seen things I never wanted to see again. Pictures of people I never liked, pictures of me much thinner, boxes of paper--how much of a life is documented in paper? There are taxes and backup documentation starting from 1980. There are check books, bank statements, bills, correspondence, journals, greeting cards, college work, grad school papers, case studies, interior design layouts, every lease I signed from 1985 onward, moving company contracts and inventories, newspaper clippings, letters of confirmation for job offers, reports, project outlines, my video reel of spots I wrote or produced, business cards, personalized business stationery, recipes, and comic strips (most of which still strike me as hilarious).

Despite the hours I put into sifting through paper and moving furniture around, I barely scratched the surface. I do have an impressive, open, well-lit, and functional work area now. Alongside of that, however, there are at least twenty more boxes just like the ones I unpacked this week. There are piles and piles of clothes to be sorted and donated to charity. There are hundreds of yards of fabric that need to be sorted, grouped, and properly stored. It is the boxes, though, that I dread. It is too much history, too much looking back and thinking about what my life was intended to be, what I hoped would happen, what I tried to create for myself, what I actually ended up with, and all of the painful, awkward, and best-left-forgotten memories that are confined to the interior of corrugated cardboard cartons. Cartons of paper, cartons of memories, cartons of me and the past I thought I would want to preserve.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Nature abhors a vacuum, yet it is a large, open, empty space I hope to create. Nature can put her crap somewhere else. The basement is mine, empty or not.