Shannon’s crowded basement was bringing her down and perfectionism was getting in the way of her doing anything about it. In this “Good Enough in Practice” episode, Shannon and Janine discuss Shannon’s basement challenges, her beliefs around what she needed to do before she could start decluttering and organizing her basement and they talk it through to the point where she can’t wait to get started!
Discussion topics include:
- Shannon’s overwhelming basement and how it became The Basement of Doom
- The various roles Shannon’s basement fulfills
- Janine’s own basement woes and how having a water problem forced a solution to them
- The perfectionistic loop of trying to figure out the best way to tackle a big project
- What’s important to Shannon about how she organizes her basement
- How Janine’s organizing company handles overwhelming basements
- Shannon’s need to have a plan in place before starting: “How do I know what I’m doing if I haven’t pre-planned it?”
- Janine’s faith in Shannon’s ability to proceed without a detailed plan
- Using pre-planning as a way to come up with a starting place (rather than a finishing place)
- Janine’s caution about having a plan you feel you have to stick to
- Shannon’s historic difficulties working with a professional organizer
- Bix’s meltdown, which we couldn’t edit out
- Shannon’s new plan to let go of the easy stuff so that she can put lids on bins and work through them one bin at a time
- How this framework of recognizing what’s important to you, what’s keeping you stuck, and brainstorming some different approaches until something feels right can be applied to many different challenges
- Shannon’s excitement over the prospect of getting started on her basement!
Update from Shannon: I was, in fact, so excited to start that I headed straight down to the basement after we finished recording! I made some progress then, and in a few sessions since. My husband has also put some time in, so we’re on our way to having a basement that works well for us. It still feels like a big project, but a doable one.
As promised, here are some before and after pictures of Janine’s basement. The first two are before and after her big clean out (which she blogged about here) and the third is after the basement waterproofing and renovation.
