When it comes to clutter, don’t think; just throw it out

It was a moment of truth.

My daughter’s outspoken young friend stood in the middle of our living room and said, “You need ‘Clean Sweep’.”

Now, for anybody who doesn’t watch TV, this is not a compliment. “Clean Sweep” is one of those reality makeover shows in which organizational experts reorganize the most cluttered house on the block.

“WHAT?” I said in disbelief. “You always said our house was cozy.”

“It used to be cozy. Now it just looks cluttered.”

For the record, I don’t usually take my cues from 12-year-olds who are shorter than me, especially those who aren’t related by blood. But Little Miss Trading Spaces had only revealed what was already gnawing on me to begin with.

After seven years of steady family life, our cozy, cottage-y, absent-minded writers’ house had become an emporium for baby books with no covers, wardrobes with broken doors, kitchen equipment that hadn’t made the right whir in years and 450 framed pictures stored in boxes under a door-turned-laundry table in the basement.

And so soon after Little Miss Feng Shui made her pronouncement, I went in search of the extraneous and unnecessary, beginning with the kitchen, where I knew I would find instant gratification.

Sure enough, right away, I spotted the rice cooker that I got one Christmas and that I promptly started on fire. Out went the rice cooker.

There was the bread maker that quit working after six honey-wheat loaves and two foccacias, which the bread company had refused to replace despite two hours on the phone with customer service. Into the trash went the bread maker.

There were the olive jars I’d been saving, 15 of them in the top of the glassware cupboard, to fill with homemade jelly my daughter and I were going to make. Only we never learned to make homemade jelly.

Next were the coffee cups.

Now this is a collection that numbers in the dozens, maybe in the hundreds. It takes up one entire level of cupboard space in the kitchen, despite the fact that there’s only one coffee drinker in the house and the kids drink about six cups of hot chocolate a year.

Here was where I could make real progress.

And yet here is where I got into trouble. Because I stopped to think. About where each and every coffee cup originated.

Rule No. 1, apparently, of decluttering: Don’t stop to think, analyze or remember when.

To my credit, I managed to throw away three cups with broken handles and to at least begin sorting through the book shelf in my 7-year-old son’s room, which has been the repository over the years for hundreds of hand-me-down books about mice that save the day and rabbits whose jackets get caught on fences.

Baby books, in other words. How could I get rid of the last of the BABY books?

Ah, perhaps one day, there will be a Round 2, when I will line up large black trash bags in the kitchen, into which I will carelessly toss school papers from 1991, stained tablecloths that haven’t been used since my first child’s first birthday and bags of Easter basket grass I’ve been recycling for a decade of chocolate eggs.

As for my first attempt at decluttering, I ended it in about 12 minutes, with a certain measure of comfort.

I am who I am.

And it’s not just me.

The other day my 15-year-old came dragging in what looked like a cross between a step ladder for giants, a book shelf and a dance cage from the 1970s TV show, “Laugh-In.”.

“What IS that?” I asked.

“Something I picked up in somebody’s spring cleaning pile on the street.”

With that, he marched up the stairs and put it in his room, right next to his school papers from 1991.