I don't know what got into me this morning, and I almost didn't make it through the day, but I accomplished a HUGE thing today. I did have help; I drafted the kids into picking up most of the monstrous pile. I started in the back of the house, in the boys' rooms, and swept EVERYTHING into the living room. In some (most) houses this probably wouldn't amount to much, but let me tell you, without exaggeration, that was a lot. When I'd gotten it all out of the boys' rooms, the back of the hallway, and 1/3 of my room, there was a solid mass of sh...stuff through half the hall and all of the living room, wall to wall to wall, a minimum of 6" deep. A good dozen baskets of laundry hauled downstairs later, it looked like the picture below.
I also moved C's dresser out of E's room. It's stashed in the hallway for now; I don't have anywhere else to put it that doesn't disturb someone else's room. Can someone remind me why the girls are sharing a smaller room than B has to himself? There's a little more furniture rearranging to do there, but that's a job for another day.
We always say that one cannot *clean* (PCCX especially) what is cluttered. I don't necessarily have a clutter issue, per se, as I don't have a lot of collections and things to be whittled down and weeded out, but there is a veritable ton of stuff just out...trash on the floor, laundry on the floor, toys on the floor, papers on the floor, everything on the floor. There's no way I can clean anything until all of that is gone. That's what today was about: taking back at least a couple of rooms so that I can get in there and really clean stuff. When I recover from today that is.