It never fails…My husband and I have been married for nearly five years, now. In that time we have moved from Chicago to Nevada and been through some pretty tough times together, but in the end we have always made sure that the problems we faced were shared and conquered equally between us. For most of the everyday issues and stumbling blocks that get thrown in our path, there is usually a way to negotiate through them…except one: the subject of housecleaning.

Oh, yes…on the issue of organizing the vast collection of clutter that the two of us seem remarkably adept at acquiring, there is no doubt that my partner protects every shred of his personal property like a trained pit bull. It doesn’t matter that much of his stuff had been in a box for at least 10 years and that he has long since forgotten their contents. The moment I show him a dusty, broken, incomplete, or outdated artifact from his storeroom jungle, it seems to provoke a knee-jerk reaction of “SAVE THAT!!!” before any other explanation is offered.

The state of most of the rooms in our house bear witness to this tendency to view everything as valuable and irreplaceable: faded receipts, generations of old electronics that have since been replaced, obsolete media (BETA tapes or players, empty audio & video cassette organizers, old camcorders that stopped working 20 years ago, etc.) and so on. The list extends far and beyond our own lifetimes and into those of our parents and grandparents who over the years have graced us with knick-knacks that they themselves were tired of having around, but not so tired that they would ever commit the sacrilege of throwing the item out because it is still “perfectly good” a phrase which is actually code for “We don’t want to be held accountable for throwing this out, so we’ll let you deal with it”.

My husband’s parents grew up in the era of the Great Depression, and were both prone to hanging on to everything they could to help them feel secure and give them hope for a more prosperous future. Unfortunately, even when times DID eventually get better, the clutter in their house got worse. My own grandparents, who seldom left the house, tended to treat their domicile like a “live-in library” where everything they could possibly want or need was always close to hand…and often underfoot.