The Basement is back! By that I mean both the actual basement in my house and this blog. This blog got the name “Brent’s Basement” because most of what I post about is either Roleplaying Games, Miniatures Games, Board games or model building.

Almost all of those activities either take place in the basement of my house, or the materials required for them are stored in my basement.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of places, my basement flooded back in July 2016.
Fortunately most of our stuff is either stored on bookshelves, cabinets or in plastic bins. So, other than the carpeting and the drywall, we didn’t lose much.
The physical bookshelves did soak up water, so they were also lost, but the items on the shelves were fine.

Unfortunately, it did mean the floors and walls needed to be redone, so everything that was in the basement got boxed up and put into storage.
That happened fairly quickly. And then things stalled. It took several months for the insurance company to approve all the estimates for getting the flooring, carpeting and walls redone. Once they finally did do the approvals, the actual repairs went reasonably quickly and our contents were finally returned.

Except, everything had been packed into boxes, but because a lot of the boxes contained books and games, they only filled them a third to half full. So when they came back they literally filled the basement from wall to wall, with just barely enough room to walk from room to room.

This was the bottom of the stairs

Then moved into the Media Room

Then into Michelle’s studio, which had the most available space:

Into the Library and my main hobby room:

And the hallway and pantry area leading from the stairs past the laundry area and into the Library.  Had barely enough room to get the freezer and refrigerator opened:

This was a fairly typical box and how it was packed:

And, another example:

I ended up stacking as many boxes as high as I could on one side of the room to free up some wall space on the other side, then unpacking and stacking the contents on the floor as high as I could again without the whole thing falling over:

Eventually the new Billy Bookcases arrived, I had some family members come over for a building bee and with some shuffling of boxes and some fancy maneuvering, the bookcases got built and things started getting put back into place

It took a long time to get things unpacked, then reorganized, new bookcases built and filled, but that process is now 95% finished and I’m at the point that I can start working on projects again.
Now I just need to decide if I want to paint some Character miniatures, some Starship miniatures, or build a few Starship models. And do some posting about it in this blog along the way.