Think about it. Why tackle the impossible — and try to create order out of chaos — if you don’t have to? That’s why us hoarders don’t get very far in our efforts if there’s no end goal or objective in sight. If you’re like me, you’ve told your spouse or your children “I’ll take care of it” when they pressure you about dealing with all that stuff. But good intentions are one thing and specific action is another. I don’t get around to “taking care of it” unless there’s a deadline to strike terror in my heart and light a fire under me. I’m assuming the same is true of you, right?

Back in October 2012, my older daughter Anna delivered a soft ultimatum: she was flying home for Christmas for a week’s visit and intended to bring a friend — and she wanted the house picked up. Ever the supportive mom, I said yes, of course I could do it — a response rooted in that part of my brain which functions under a vague cloud of fantastical thinking. In this state, I rationalize that I don’t have a hoarding problem; I just have too much stuff and have to “edit” just like all the home decor websites and shelter magazines advise us to do.  (It may help you to know that I’ve written a few of these articles myself, embarrassed at the fact that I can dish out advice I can’t seem to live by.)

Problem is, this editing gets me into trouble because then I open up and touch EVERYTHING because how else can I deal with it? Thus I “clean” verrrrry slowwwwwwly when I’m digging through boxes and bags and tubs of stuff, and for every one thing I put in the “give up” pile, 17 items get shuffled into “keep” piles and put in other rooms or storage areas.

I wanted to reclaim my spare bedroom enough to put Anna’s friend in there, but that too was fantastical thinking as it was crammed full of stuff and had no room for a bed. (That “spare bedroom” title has always been a misnomer; I treat it like a giant closet, a dumping ground for everything I can’t deal with, and sadly it’s the biggest bedroom in my four-bedroom home. So what does that say about my priorities? But I digress.)

Every time I went into the spare bedroom to clean, I’d feel overwhelmed and give up.

So before I could meet Anna’s Christmas deadline, I knew I’d have to create an earlier one for myself to get moving.

That’s where my friend Barbara comes in. She does estate sales, pricing and selling the contents of homes whose owners are frequently wealthy snowbirds with multiple residences. Which means these sales feature very gently-used well-made furniture at ridiculously affordable prices. When Barb called me in to help her price items for an upcoming sale, I found a guest bedroom set of whitewashed rattan and bamboo-style furnishings, practically new, including two twin beds, a side table and a dresser, all for under $500. This purchase was my motivation to clear out enough space to actually turn my spare bedroom back into a spare bedroom. And I had two weekends to accomplish this, as Barb needed the house emptied of all furniture just before Thanksgiving.

I took photos of the room before and after to show my progress. (Keep in mind that the “after” didn’t come close to a designer showroom since the walls are still walls lined with storage tubs, bookshelves and dressers packed with stuff) but I was able to clear enough floor space to get everything in.

Once I upload the photos, you’ll see what I was up against.

My test run for the Christmas week guest was an early December guest my younger daughter Emma brought home for an overnight stay before Serena boarded her plane home for the holidays. For the span of 6 hours the spare bedroom looked charming; I’d dug out some fun vintage figurine lamps I’d topped with funky shades, and the two beds were made up with mismatched but color-coordinated linens. Emma cooed and oohed and aaahed — the sort of thing that encourages me to keep cleaning and decluttering. (Not being yelled at is always a motivator.)

And I liked what I had accomplished. The room was sweet, like a child’s dream of what Grandma’s house should be — all pastels and soft colors, cozy quilts and pillows piled high.

But once Serena left, I made the mistake of treating the spare bedroom as my staging area for Christmas; I put all the gifts in there along with wrapping paper and gift bags. Those nice neat clean areas were buried under pile of stuff once again. Chaos reasserted itself.

And bad mom that I am, I did another thing which frustrated Emma; I used her fairly tidy room as a “sort and stash” area while decluttering the spare bedroom, and boxes and bags of wool sweaters (which I’d felted in my ongoing fantasy of making a felted wool sweater blanket) ended up in there, which did not help her allergies one bit.

The dreaded ultimatum — the friend coming for Christmas — never materialized. Once Anna let me know that, I let the spare bedroom go.

The whole affair reminded me of that scene near the end of Titanic where Rose is floating atop a wooden board and trying to hold onto Jack while he freezes to death in the cold water. Eventually she realizes it’s hopeless, he’s a lost cause, and she lets go of him and he sinks into the deep.

I was Rose, clinging to the fantasy that the spare bedroom might actually function as a spare bedroom this Christmas, when in reality it was still a nightmare space of hoarding and once I let go of maintaining it, it quickly sunk back into disaster.

On New Year’s Day I vowed to go back in and reclaim it. But there were two strikes against me.

First, by this time Emma had shoved all those felted sweaters back into the spare bedroom and you couldn’t even walk in the door without climbing over bags and piles of stuff. Second, I was stuck in the kitchen cleaning up the unwashed messes of New Year’s Eve dinner. And while you can hide your hoard away in bedrooms and ignore the awfulness, having a nasty dirty kitchen is a sign that you’ve gone from merely suburban-housewife-gone-amok hoarding into I-have-a-serious-mental-illness hoarding.

You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there.

I tell friends that cleaning up my house is like playing chess. You can’t move one piece or thing without impacting all the other stuff. But I know most people don’t live that way. Most people have only one chess set at a time on a chess board. I cram in three. And that’s why there’s never enough room.

I’m still struggling with the fact that I’ll have to give up the pawns and focus on the rooks, bishops, knights, queens and kings. If I can edit down to the essentials, that’ll give me the room I need. But that requires letting go, and we all know how hard that is…

The good news is that I cleaned Anna’s room enough so that she could use it comfortably, even though I had piles of stuff on the desk and dresser. But that’s par for the course with Anna. After all, she grew up in my house. I wish, however, that I could do better by her whenever she comes home for a visit. She deserves a clutter free house. Don’t we all?