The clean room

My house is largish. Not a huge mansion but a fairly comfortable single story home. My son has very generous room. It is about 6 x 4m with a 2 x 2.5m entry foyer (for want of a better description). Sort of an L shape. In it are his single bed, bedside table, a 2.4m long desk, two large book shelves that are attached to either side of a corner unit and a small coffee table.

In his room there are 13 drawers and about 17 linear meters of shelving and desk top.

Now he is only ten so he hasn’t really had much time to accumulate much junk so you would think this spacious room with just oodles of storage would look rather Spartan. Wrong! It is cram packed with junk.

Each drawer puffs open (well the ones that aren’t so jammed with stuff to the point they no longer can be opened). There isn’t a square centimetre of desk space on which he can work. The floor is generally covered with bits of Lego or meccano or cars or bits of cut up paper or other junk. The shelves are piled with toys and books and yet more junk.

It distress my partner greatly. The trouble is it is his junk and he will not part with it. I can sympathise with that. I did help him do a bit of re-organising of the junk and the room looks a little more presentable. I even gave him the “put it back when you have finished” lecture but I know I was just blowing into the wind.

There is no cure. There is no reprieve. He has been cursed with the pack rat gene. Forever he will be cursed with having to get ever increasing storage space to house his valuable junk. Poor kid.