In my last post I talked about cleaning my house in preparation for appraisal – This turned into more of a great purge. I located and generated more than enough garbage to fill my weekly curbside receptacle several times. I sorted it into ‘perishable’ (stuff that’s gonna stink), and nonperishable items. the perishable items made it curbside. i’ll work on removing the rest from the premises after this week’s trash pickup.
About half of my purge focused on my basement. I’ve acquired so much stuff that I “might” need – antiquated PC hardware – (never know when I’ll need a 10/100 PCMCIA NIC or an ISA sound card – oh, right. Never. Never is when i’ll need these items.) or 3 year old business documents that were only marginally useful when they were new and are completely worthless now.
So I sorted and disposed of this stuff – trashing the old hardware and sorting, scanning, and shredding the paper documents. most of the clutter in my basement is now put in its proper place (the garbage bin), and my downstairs workspace is now, for the most part, ready for business. Over the last couple days, my city has gotten some well-needed rainfall. quite a bit actually. So much in fact that I got several gallons coming into my basement. This is where I saw the greatest benefit to the purge – I had no more boxes of paper documents on the floor to get wet and ruined. in fact the only thing remaining on the floor at all are a 2×4 and some bricks. my network infrastructure, which I’m very proud of, is elevated 2 feet off the floor, suspended on shelving hung from the cieling. my workbench has metal castors keeping even its beefy wooden legs elevated above any potential water damage.
So while I did spend some time in my basement sweeping water around, it wasnt very stressful – after all, there was no urgency to the process (aside from removing my cat’s ability to roll in it and track it upstairs) as I had nothing left down there for it to destroy, and had I left my basement to its own devices, the dehumidifier would’ve made quick work of the infiltration anyway.
No tip today, just an observation – these small changes can indeed have a major impact – and once I’ve seen how small of an impact on my life that water infiltration actually has, my mind is just a bit more at ease when I hear those drops falling or see stormclouds rolling in. So let it rain. I’ll be sleeping soundly.
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