Clean, clutter cycle

Expecting child number five to join overflowing small house, the mother needed to convert her attic into a fourth bedroom – but it was three feet deep in boxes of out-grown clothes – opened and strewn from children searching for larger sizes.
“I wish I could help, but the only free time I have is in the early morning.” my sister commiserated during a visit.
“I’ll take it. Come. I need the help.”
Sis showed up the next day at 6 a.m.
“I knew you would be early …” the lady-in-waiting said as she rubbed her eyes and opened the door.
That first day they simply wove their way up the stairs around boxes to the attic. It took two mornings – that began at 6:30 a.m. – to clear the steps. The woman only sorted when my sister came.
“Except for the bags that were obviously just garbage, I really couldn’t help her much, she had to decide whether to keep or toss, but I moved the boxes and put the piles in front of her to make the decision. I was there every day for 90 minutes. It took six weeks to get the attic sorted out.”
They also needed to find space in the parents’room for a bassinet. The bedroom mirrored the attic. Sis took a vacation day to insure on-time completion.
Then she cut back to three days a week for the rest of the house.
A particular bone of contention for the wife centered on her husband’s desk and the perpetual pile beside it. The pile of ads, magazines, books and pamphlets printed off the Internet had slowly spread until it took up most of the living room. He would not let his wife touch the pile but, he could not decide what to keep and what to toss.
“Somehow he allowed me to go through it.” Sis said. “I kind of went a little crazy. I took two or three vacation days to work on it. He had not done his taxes for a couple years simply because he knew he had some deductions he could take, but he could not find the paper work,” she added.
She filled up garbage bags and introduced the family to an organized filing system – and their living room floor.
She turned to look at the couple’s thousands of books, audio books and bookshelves, inside and out on the porch.
“They love books. You know how libraries get rid of old, good books, well they took those books,” she observed.
One of the goals was to fill up a dumpster each week as well as to give things away and put others into storage. Sis tried, unsuccessfully, to teach them that if there was not space in the house, on a shelf or in a drawer, then they had too much and they needed to share it with others. Currently, the couple is renting a storage unit and losing a battle to not clutter it.
Toys and books spilled off the shelves and packed the front porch. The children walked on layers of toys and books in their bedroom. Sis took a Saturday to tackle the girl’s bedroom, the mother filled 10 bags with laundry because the children had left their clean clothes on the floor with the dirty ones. Towards the end of the day, a bug walked across the newly discovered carpet – freaking out one of the girls.
“You’ve been walking on that sort of thing all this time,” Sis shrugged.
Like the father, the oldest girl had a hard time letting go. She left for another activity – and her mother re-sorted taking out items she knew the girl would never miss.
She didn’t, and she loved the newly tidied bedroom –she finally had room for guests to visit.
Although Sis now concentrates on teaching them to de-clutter their finances, she continues emphasizing a shorter clutter/clean cycle. She knows the job is not done as long as the two unused cars still molder in the driveway.