My husband and daughter went camping this weekend. I had two nights and two days to myself and what did I do? I looked around the quiet house and came to this conclusion: if there is a flat surface around, we will cover it with stacks of stuff.

Tables, countertops, footstools, nightstands, dressers, even the dog crates. Everything was covered in clutter. Especially the closets.

A top article on clutter in Google search results comes from AARP’s magazine and its arthur notes:

In Dante’s Inferno there is a circle of Hell reserved for two warring armies, the Hoarders and the Wasters, who spend eternity rolling enormous boulders at each other on a desolate sun-baked plain. The boulders are actually diamonds and represent the possessions they had such unhealthy relationships with during their lives. “Why do you hord?” the Wasters shout. “Why do you waste?” the Hoarders scream back. This repeats, endlessly, joint punishment for their respective sins.

While our clutter does seem a bit hellish at times, in keeping with the rest of my life, it seems hoarding is only one of my many clutter personalities.

Organized Homes says “take aim on your household’s clutter problem by going to the root of the problem: your own thinking.” They outline four types of thinking that lead to clutter:

• The Hoarder who fears they won’t have what they need if they let go of anything.
• The Deferrer who like Scarlett O’Hara prefers to think about it tomorrow.
• The Rebel who is still mad at Mom for making them pick up their room and wash the dishes.
• The Perfectionist who must have the perfect organizer or label system before they’ll even start.

So how to tackle those things we put in between us and our clutter? Good Housekeeping has a neat online tool to help kickstart you. You use drop-down menus to select the portions of your home and room that you want to clean and it provides you with tips specific to that area.

I chose to tackle two closets during my free time this weekend. I gave in to the Perfectionist a bit and bought a few new things to help, but my Deferrer was banished and I told my Hoarder to get over it.

The rooms the closets reside in may be an even bigger mess than they were before, but boy it sure feels good to look in those hidden storage areas now.

Anyone else got the Spring cleaning bug? How do I keep the momentum going to attack the rest of the clutter?

In my career as a Librarian, I’ve often had to decide whether or not to preserve and store ephemera “paper items (as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles.” At work, I can be ruthless. It’s not quite so easy at home!

Kate and I had this discussion once on Twitter: how does a mother choose which priceless childhood artifacts to save? Throughout their lives, your children will produce an endless stream of pictures, notes, cards, ornaments and handmade gifts. These bits and pieces provide a visual history of life, growth, and development. But they do tend to pile up.

When my children got married, I gave them each some mementos from their elementary school days. Other items are saved in fabric boxes labeled with their names and neatly stored under one of my bookshelves. As I sort through drawers and closets, I add to these repositories.

When I have the time, I’ve been scanning photos and paper items into flickr. Adding more detail to the descriptions will have to wait, though I do try to date everything as I go.

It’s a nostalgic, frequently emotional, way to spend a few hours. But I believe that my children appreciate having access to these pieces of their past.

And I know that I’m grateful to my father for saving a bit of my own personal history. The bill pictured here was found in his desk after Dad passed away. It was the receipt for my mother’s 9-day stay in the maternity hospital where I was born. I believe he always felt he got a good bargain.

How do YOU decide what to save and where to keep it?