This year was a rather stressful one. The COVID-19 Pandemic took place and forced many people to stay at home or work from home too. This was a big change for my family because we just moved into a fixer-upper house. This was originally a great idea. We found the lowest priced home in a super nice neighborhood. We decided that we wanted to work on fixing it up while we lived in it in order to move to the best place in the state. This was a very good idea to begin with and in reality, financially it still is. But it caused a whole lot of work for us and because we were constantly working on the home we were short on space. This is when the panic ordering from online stores ended up helping us a lot. We ended up with so many Cheap moving boxes from different orderings that we didn’t know what to do with. Then it hit us, we could create a vast and tall wall of boxes to store everything in, in order to create more space. Here is what we did.
It all started when we began working in the living room. We noticed that the entire room needed to have the carpet ripped up and several floorboards replaced. This was a crazy subfloor job and it ended up taking up not only the living room but the kitchen to store the things in as well. Then we had a crazy amount of tools everywhere. While this was going on and yes we were doing it all by ourselves we decided we needed something to change. We needed help and we really needed more space. Our garage was totally full of tools and parts for the home and completely disorganized. So the goal was to take all of those cheap moving boxes we had and all the internet cardboard boxes and start stacking all the items and tools vertically. We had space to go up but the ground was strung out with things. So we started to pile it all up by job or by use.
We took large boxes and labeled them in order of the project the pieces were needed to go into and also the importance of the tools. So toolboxes had numbers from 1 to 5 and projects boxes simply had their name on them. Then we started to stack them to the brim and put the most important boxes on the top of the stack. This was so they were easier access. Now what we were able to do was to clear a little more than half of the garage of useable space. This meant that we were able to also clear about 2/3 of the kitchen of space as well. With this, we ended up being able to do more projects in the garage and not in the home itself. This left us with not only a more usable space but a safer space as well. Fewer particles were in the air constantly and we didn’t have to tape off rooms in the house with tarps constantly.
So all in all the moving into a fixer-upper during COVID was possibly a bad idea, but we managed to use what we had to make it better.
