Last week something unusual happened – I got rid of last unsorted box of stuff from my bedroom. Nine years after we moved into this house we are finally unpacked! Over the years I sorted out boxes and boxes of items around living room, office and the basement. It is not as if I haven’t been processing through the junk deposited in this room, but as the least public space in the house, the most unsortabe and unstorable of items would regularly get sent there. There was furniture from our old house that we could not make use of here, junk from other bedrooms as we made room for each new child, boxes of hardware, sewing and knitting paraphernalia, baby clothes that one kid outgrew waiting for the next one, overflow toys. On top of this, any time we needed to make the house tidy at the drop of a hat, we would just stuff everything in sight in bags and drop it off in our bedroom.

Yet, over the years I also managed to contain this mess. We passed on baby items, gave the extra furniture away, matched the toys with the kid that was interested in them and sorted the proper storage of hobby items. It the place where there used to be banker’s boxes and more banker’s boxes of who-knows-what there is clear tidy space where a little red head can camouflage.

I was surprised at how giddy I was when this last room was “finished”. We are cluttery people and I never expect to always have things in place but it is a nice feeling when you know that any room in the house is no more than two days away from being tidy. This in turn means that we could have the entire house tidy in less than a month – a theoretical possibility that is somehow comforting.