I have been wanting to blog about this since we moved in last July. Before getting our keys we still hadn’t seen the basement, but we were told there was one. A commodity in a Parisian apartment rental. It’s an extra room to put things, since Parisian apartments are rather lacking in storage space. My imagination conjured up images of a nice stone walled space where I could organize my excess paraphernalia in a neat and orderly fashion. I was quite impressed by the key to our basement space. It’s giant, heavy and very old looking. It should have been a sign as to what our basement storage space would look like, but my ever optimistic self paid no heed…

And then there was the stone staircase leading down in a spiral. Nope, I still had bright images of a basement room that I could fill with shelves and labeled plastic storage boxes…

And then there were the rusty nails on some of the walls, with very ancient looking wood paneled doors… I started to wonder…

Beyond those, I notices an entire” cave” (French for basement) that looked like it had heaved up some of the contents of the 19th century…

And then our door, with a giant key hole for that massive metal key, and the number 4 painted on wood panels dating from the 18th century (we were told from our landlords)… We opened the door to a dark, unlit, dirt floor basement, and all my dreams of label organization fell to the floor like those dusty old wine bottles. Half the walls are stone, but the other half are more of the rickety wood panels that mean nothing will ever be secure in there. It shall be a place to put junk, I suppose. But I am not much of a junk collector, so it remains relatively empty.

But the blogger in me immediately saw an opportunity for a blog post! So all was not lost!