I have a sporadic weekend hobby of going to estate sales, buying books, and then listing them on Etsy. Even though I only get to the sales every month or so, I started to accumulate a sizable stack of books. The books were in one place. And the packaging material was in another place. I made a small database to keep things organized. That was in another place. And the place were I took pictures was somewhere else.
So, I decided that ten days before Christmas was absolutely the best time to create a space in the basement to centralize everything. Because that’s what I do.
One of the joys of homeownership is a basement for storage. One of the miseries of homeownership is purging the basement of all the crap that piles up.
Our basement came with a wine cellar. Not a real wine cellar that you see in those fancy homes on HGTV. This was a closet in an unfinished basement. When we first moved in, we thought we totally cool because we had a wine cellar, even if it was more Silence of the Lambs than Napa Valley. We would go to the supermarket and carry down our two bottles of $10 wine and put them in on the rack. Thirty minutes later, we would march down to the wine cellar, get those two bottles, and then drink them. It took us about two weeks to realize that we weren’t really wine cellar types of people, and the wine cellar became the place where we dumped old computers.
Last week, I ripped out the wine cellar/computer graveyard. I pulled down one wall to let in more light and air. This morning, I painted it with some nice moisture resistant basement paint. All it needs is some IKEA bookcases, and I’ll have a proper small business that I only sporadically attend to.
I’ve been busy planning out how to scale up my five books per month business into a sprawling empire. Because that’s what I do. I follow a guy on Instagram who has a small business selling preppy bracelets. I love his warehouse. I want one, too.
All this is to say that I’ll be back to blogging this afternoon, after I take a kid to the doctor’s for a check up.
