Situation: A beach cottage with at least five generations of family memorabilia stashed into the basement. The family has inhabited this cottage since 1887 and the basement is now a combination of items from several storage rooms.

Memories abound and many valuable articles are decaying in cardboard boxes. The room is damp and chaos reigns supreme. It is overwhelming to go inside. With a small cottage and a large family, it would be a bonus to have another room for visiting out of town children and grandchildren as well as a place to store extra kitchenware and clothing.

Solution: Delve into each box and separate family memories one by one from trash and donation items. We preserved all valuable memories into plastic Sterilite boxes that stacked into one corner of the room.

Divide the room into two separate areas, storeroom and guest room using the existing partitions.

The storeroom area was set up with rows of shelves to hold extra dishes, baking and kitchen cookware that would not fit into the house. We also stored holiday items, extra clothes, memories and luggage into this side of the room.

In the guest area, books were organized on the huge floor to ceiling bookshelves. A gaming table was arranged, the bed set up with side tables with lights and a cozy reading area equipped with a wing back chair and floor lamp. This new improved basement will easily accommodate 2 – 4 houseguests.