Everyone has at least one area in their house that’s set aside for Unpacked Boxes. Right? OK, so that’s probably not true. But it’s been true in my house for years. We can attribute 10 percent of that to the fact that we’ve moved many, many times — sometimes in awfully quick succession. Ninety percent of it, though, is because some of us are pack rats.

Anyway, this week in Nichole and Jeni’s Carnival of Clutter, we’re tackling the Worst Closet in the House. And in our house? That’s Pete’s closet. It isn’t a huge closet, so there wasn’t all that much room for Stuff. But boy howdy, did we take every bit of available space with Unpacked Boxes and Other Ridiculous Things. I can’t show you what it looked like before, because Rockford emptied it out before I was able to take a picture of it. But I can show you some of the stuff that came out of it:

That, friends, is a lot for one small closet to hold. And that isn’t even all of it! I would’ve needed a wider frame to capture all of it. But we cleared it all out, and now Pete’s closet is actually holding his clothes! Cleaning out his closet also made room for me to try a toy-rotation system, which I’ve been wanting to do for quite awhile. I separated his toys into groups — dinosaurs, cars, different types of blocks, etc. — and put about half of them in boxes in the top of the closet. In a month or so, I’ll swap out something that’s been out and available and put something from storage back in the rotation — something along the lines of: dinos out, robots in. It’s been great for helping to keep his room clean, and I think not being faced with So Many Toys has also made it easier for him to play by himself in his room. Both of which are nice for me.

Also nice? Opening the closet door and seeing this:

As for the Worst Closet at Jeni’s house, she cast a Scourgify spell on it. Now she has the perfect place to store any boy wizards that might happen her way.

(Oh look! I’m giving away two Atlanta CityPASSes! You should enter!)

I was bemoaning the state of the house recently, and my friend Jeni from Peace and Carrots was commiserating. It seems we’re both living in clutter-filled houses, and we’d both like to do something about it. But the clutter. Sometimes just looking at it overwhelms me to the point that I close the door on it and find something else to do. Like watch TV, which isn’t such a good thing on many levels.

Anyway.

Jeni and I decided to start decluttering our respective homes, and we thought the best way to go about it would be to hold one another accountable. Which means, clearly, that we’ll both be blogging about it. Thus making us accountable to you as well.

So here’s what we’re doing: Each week we’re picking one trouble spot. We’ll take pictures of a particularly bad area in its before and after states, and we’ll share them with you on Thursdays. The next week, it’ll be a different trouble spot.

(Want to declutter with us? Let me know!)

Jeni chose The Master Bedroom as our target spot. Rockford and I did a pretty major decluttering in our bedroom a few weeks ago, so it’s much better than it was. But there are still a few Trouble Areas, specifically the top of the dresser.

So there’s quite a bit of weird stuff on top of the dresser. For example:

A Christmas pickle that didn’t make it back into the attic with the other ornaments.

A partially disassembled doorknob that I wanted to take back to Lowe’s because we weren’t going to use it. But I couldn’t take it back, because a 3-year-old took it apart and now I can’t find half of it.

A cassette tape case featuring a particularly young and creepy-looking Neil Young. I don’t know whether the tape is in the case. Please note that until two weeks ago we did not have a cassette player in the house, yet we have a frightful number of cassettes in various spots in the house.

A pinwheel.

Two giant beakers-turned-banks. One is for pennies, the other is for silver coins and paper money. Much as I like to keep those pennies in their place, I’m going to consolidate them.

Golf tees.

A lip-shaped eraser.

Two containers that look like take-out containers but are really holding more Christmas ornaments. Clearly, we did not do a thorough job putting away the Christmas. But it’s important to note that I am not storing mu shu in the bedroom.

I very much like the idea of not letting clutter in the house, but that is so hard to do. I might make that a long-term goal, but for now I’m just going to try to edit what we already have to what we need or love. It sounds so Gwyneth goopish that I hesitate to say it, but it’s true: I want to be surrounded by things that speak to me.

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

William Morris said that, and I’m going to try to make that our guiding idea. And lip-shaped erasers? They really don’t meet that description. They might be necessary, seeing as we have children and we homeschool and all. But they’re most definitely not an item that needs to be in my bedroom.

So I edited the top of the dresser, and here’s how it looks now:

In a word: Better. I also removed the stacks of books and My Little Ponies from the bedside tables, put away two baskets of folded laundry and put the pile of outgrown kids’ clothes in a bag to take to Goodwill.

Even if I can’t get the rest of the house to the Zen Habits standard, I hope we can keep the extraneous stuff out of the bedroom. It would get the day off to a nice start to wake up in a clean, uncluttered environment.

(That would, however, hinge upon things like this not happening. You know, things like when your 3-year-old stops walking the line between wonderful and horrid that 3-year-olds so often walk, and he jumps so far into horrid that you go all the way to your Last Resort, which is confiscating all of his toys. And then those toys have to go somewhere, and that somewhere is your bedroom floor, even if you’ve just finished decluttering your dresser and it looks so nice. And by this time you are so overwhelmed you could cry. But this is a problem for another post. I’m going to gaze upon my dresser now.)