And I thought we were pack rats

The other day, Ryan and I decided to clean out the furnace room so that we could put it to better use, rather than to just use it as a junk room. Also, we wanted to move the litter box in there and needed to find just the right spot. It seemed like a pretty straight forward thing to do as we’ve never used that room other than occasionally to open the door and throw an empty box in. And, in all honesty, it’s not a very big room – big enough for the furnace, water heater and an old kitchen counter with cabinets pushed up against the wall.

So why spend my time writing about cleaning a few things out of a useless space in the house? Well, when we moved into this house two and a half years ago, we discovered that the previous owners were…for lack of a better word…rather odd. They took being a pack rat to a whole new level. Put it this way, when we viewed, and subsequently purchased, the house, we didn’t even know there was a workshop in the basement. We saw the door in the room that’s our guest room (the previous owner’s office), but there was so much junk in the room that you could only walk from the door to the computer. You could not get to the door – or anything else in the room for that matter. When we asked what was behind door number one, we were told it was a cold cellar. On the day the house became ours; we walked around the now-empty home, and to our surprised, discovered a reasonable-size workshop behind the door.

That was the pleasant surprise. The unpleasant surprise was the mountain of garbage along the side of the house. Everything from old margarine containers to outdated computer programming books were piled high right outside our side door. It took six weeks to dispose of all the garbage. Then there were the two-dozen or so empty wine bottles under the sink in the laundry room and the construction material in the garage.

The picture was taken on the day we went to sign the papers. It's of the laundry room, not the furance room, but I think it gives the general idea.

So, with all that in mind, we set about to clean out the furnace room. Here, in no particular order, is a list of what we found:
· Extra floor tiles for the workshop
· The cut-off pieces of floor tiles for the kitchen
· A box of ceiling tiles
· Floor grout or something like that.
· Random plastic baggies of nuts, bolts, screws etc.
· Shelves for the closet organizers in all three upstairs bedrooms
· Shelves for a bookcase, I think.
· A broken covering for the florescent lights in the basement
· A bed headboard, or maybe it’s a footboard
· Some large black tube of sorts that Ryan said is used when installing toilets.
· Random pieces of broken wood.
· One of those workshop screw sorters…you know the boxes with all the tiny little drawers in it.
· A box of florescent light bulbs (at last something useful!)
· Cardboard.

Some of the junk went out in the garbage this week, and other stuff is sitting in the basement while we wonder what the heck to do with it. The answer is likely to kick it to the curb next week.

I’d like to say that we have now finally rid ourselves of the previous owners, but I’m sure six months from now, we’ll find something else in a corner of a cupboard that will leave us wondering why anyone would keep it. And besides, we’re still getting their mail.