Living Simply: The Furnace Room

The basement of our house is like one big storage area. We rarely go down there except to store things and do laundry. There's a guest room, laundry area, three storage spaces, a bathroom and a rec-room. It's dark and gloomy. There are no windows, half the lights don't work and much of it is unfinished. Since the basement is the area of my house where stuff accumulates the most I'm going to be focusing on this area in the next few weeks.

The first room to get my attention is the furnace room.

This room is an extension to my kitchen. There are two deep freezers and a couple shelves that store canned food, bulk food items, wine making equipment and larger kitchen tools like the dehydrator and water bath canner. It's not a pretty place.

That grey storage cabinet at the end of the room is always a complete mess. It's suppose to be for tools and is my Hubby's responsibility. I'm considering sending all his stuff outside to the shed and using the space to store other things.

There is even some art sitting in this room that we took down when renovating our bedroom. It has to go back upstairs. 

My goals for this room are to donate or sell anything we don't use, install some shelving above the freezers, empty the grey storage cabinet of tools, hang the art upstairs, discard old food from the freezers and donate any good unopened food items that won't get eaten. I don't think I'm going to worry about making it look pretty. As long as it's functional that should be good enough.

If you have any ideas for improving this room, please leave a comment below. Also, be sure to check Elisa's blog post on simplifying the living room.