Hints of organization in the bowels of the basement

I'm one of those people who likes to peer into people's basements. I find it one of the more interesting areas of the house as it's not all "prettified" for daily living but purposefully (sometimes) organized for projects or cluttered with all the stuff that just doesn't "go" on the main floor and more likely than not should just go to Goodwill already. (Seriously, I've moved several boxes of garage sale stuff multiple times now). So I did a photo tour of our own basement to personally track its progress. Two weeks ago the place was barely passable, but Eric has been diligently building shelves from scrap wood and putting things in their place and now you can (more or less) walk through the rooms without fear of tripping. My main area of domain is the "wine cellar" (a glamourous name for the cave that I painted, tiled and outfitted with cheap IKEA racks slapped with a coat of stain and which will likely never hold a bottle of wine with a price greater than $14.99 (hey, we're simple people). If you want to see some original wine cellar and basement pics wade through here (http://martineaubungalow.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-it-looked-for-party.html)
Through trial and mostly error we learned that Eric's home-brewed beer does not work on the wine racks. Since it's only capped when placed on their sides the bottles tend to leak. So with leftover wine rack shelves I custom built E a rack with a ledge at the front to set the necks of the bottles up on an angle and a brace toward the middle to keep the bottles securely in place. And voila no more leaky beer bottles:
If you went through the old thread you saw the front room in the basement completely empty. It has not been that way in months and likely never will again until the day we leave (ha!). Here's the furnace camouflaged by stacks of our stuff:

Across from the furnace is a wardrobe unit we crammed down here that now holds my craft supplies:

Lacking Eric's ingenuity to assemble shelves from old door jams and such I cheated and went with the Gorm IKEA rack to house my Comfest tubs:

In the waaaayyy back room that has been dubbed the workshop here's the shelf Eric built out of old door jam pieces with shelves donated by our friend Rick:

Across the room is my former shoe rack (from the old house) converted to tool storage. We barely squeaked that one down the crazy stairs (after it sat in our dining room for months because we feared it would never make it, but didn't bother to actually check until we finally got sick of it and needed the room back for Thanksgiving), but we made it and what a diffence it makes!

Another view of the same shelf (and our glass block window that replaced the plywood). Where the wire table sits Eric intends to build a workbench:

My parents bequeathed to us (after much pleading on my part) an old library card file system (silly me I don't have a photo of it here) that in my childhood home used to hold all kinds of things. The tags on each little file label say things like: pencils, brushes, washers, nuts, nails, emery boards and stones(?!). It's an awesome place to stash all the crazy little hardware pieces we have collected over the years as it's got 96 drawers! We hemmed and hawed and negotiated about where it should live and Eric gets credit for the idea put it here where the bags of concrete and mortar are resting:

There are about 7 inches of brick shelf there to stabilize it (it's only 15" deep), and just enough room across to fit it between the cubby shelf (left) and the post on the right. We'll add legs to the front end which will leave us with shallow storage underneath, it will block the nasty dirt-filled crawlspace behind it, and put the drawers at eye-level for easy access! Wait! If you look closely in the photo below you can almost see it underneath the sled:

The shelf above came from the basement in the old house. Eric created it using our old futon frame for the shelves. He had to dismantle it to get it out of the old house and reassemble it in our basement where it holds bicycle equipment, boxes of Christmas crap, cleaning supplies and who knows what else right now. We've still got many shelves and a workbench to build before we will declare the basement "organized"!