For the first time since we moved in, I feel like our house is too small. Except that it’s not actually our house that too small – like everyone else, we just have too much stuff.

I’ve been wandering from room to room, wondering how I can possibly clean up when there is no room left to put anything, and then I cry because I’m 37 weeks pregnant and I am totally incapable of controlling my emotions in any way. But I press on and pick up a few things here and there before I collapse from exhaustion or discomfort or the emotional trauma of finding a sock in the pants drawer. Hurray for hormones.

Despite ending up on the couch 43 times a day, I feel compelled to keep working away at the clutter. Sometime in the next three or four weeks we are going to have a baby and at some point we will have to put him somewhere. And when I put him down, I want to be able to find him back.

Right now, I’m just not sure where that place is going to be.

The only answer is to declutter – to an extent that we’ve never decluttered before. And, luckily, nobody is more enthusiastic about decluttering than a pregnant woman in nesting mode.

Thankfully we’ve been at this decluttering thing for a couple of years now and I know that there are TWO areas that make the most difference, not just in the bedroom but for the entire house.

1) Clothing – paring down the clothing to about five outfits per child has worked wonders for us in the past and I regret straying from this system in the spring. With fewer clothes, we end up doing far less laundry overall because my kids can’t change 62 times a day, leaving their mostly-clean clothes on the bathroom floor where they inevitably get wet and smelly. Given that fall doesn’t start for another month, it’s a bit too early to put away the summer clothing for good, but I bet I can pack up half of it without anyone noticing. I’m certainly going to give it a try!

2) Toys – I wish I could pare down the toys to five per child, just like the clothing. In fact, I wish I had the guts to take away ALL their toys like this blogger did, but I’m afraid of offending the people who gave us the toys as gifts.

You would never know it by looking at my house, but I spend at least an hour just picking up toys every single day. You know what I’d rather be doing?

Anything.

Right now, I can barely reach the ground but I know that if I don’t pick up that teeny little bright pink Barbie shoe, I am going to end up with it embedded in my foot by the time the day is done.

Harbour is at three and she’s at that stage where a good part of her day is spent filling boxes, bags, treasure chests and buckets with a random assortment of trinkets, only to be dumped in a new location and refilled with other random trinkets. Yesterday when I was at the checkout desperately searching my purse for my debit card, I found six seashells, a headless Snow White doll and half a wooden cupcake. Not super helpful when you’re trying to pay for stamps.

I do get Harbour to help me clean up, but sorting 52 different toy pieces into bins is a bit beyond the scope of a three year old. She’s more at the “put this pillow back on the bed” level of cleaning, and often only after a lot of encouragement.

Sometimes it’s just quicker to work on my own, and with that in mind, a couple days ago I put a movie on for the girls and tackled their old room by myself. Somehow I ended up in hormone-induced hyper-organizing mode. I didn’t plan it, it just happened.

I mean, it all started innocently enough: I had accidentally bought a 3-pack of large-sized Ziploc baggies that were too small for what I needed but PERFECT for toys.

I grabbed a baggy for seashells because I swear one of these days I am going to step on one and it will break and the sharp pieces will stab the arch of my foot and I will teach the girls a variety of new four-lettered words. Just like they will learn in a few weeks when I go into labour.

Next, I started a second bag for game pieces. Suddenly I couldn’t stop myself. I sorted almost every single toy in the whole entire playroom and sealed them all up in baggies. I now have bags for plastic flowers, tiny plastic princess accessories, small pieces from the wooden doll house, letter blocks, magnetic blocks, magnetic letters, Barbies, Barbie clothes, My Little Ponies, My Little Pony clothes (????), tool sets, tiny wooden shapes, peg dolls, felted toy food, wooden toy food, plastic toy food, seashells, jewels, beads, three different doctor sets and more. We have 20 bags worth of toys that I was previously sorting out each and every day.

Sometime this week, after we have finished gathering orphaned pieces from around the house, these baggies will be sealed in a large Rubbermaid bin and that bin will be time-capsuled away in the laundry room, along with our out-of-season clothing and other toys that have already been forgotten.

Already the room feels lighter. You have to understand – this isn’t a punishment. I’m always amazed at how eager the girls are to play in their room once I’ve emptied half of the toys out of it. In fact, they even enthusiastically helped me sort out the toys on Friday night (it might have been a bedtime stall tactic) and they haven’t once asked to have them back. Now they have just their favourites and the room to enjoy them.

So what’s left over? A toy kitchen with some dishes, a metal tea party set and a wooden cupcake set; a lemonade stand that they use as a store, the wooden doll house with furniture and dolls in a bin underneath; a basket of dolls and stuffed toys (which I will be attacking next), the plastic princess dolls that my Harbour takes everywhere, and a chest of dress up toys (half of which I already emptied out a month or two ago). I figure that 30% of that stuff can be moved to their new room, 30% can find a home in our living room, and the rest will be moved to the basement.

As for the toys that have been sorted out, they’ll be pulled out again in six months or so, when we will decide 1) what needs to be kept for sentimental reasons, 2) what might be enjoyed again, and 3) what can be safely donated because no one has missed it in the least. This will be after two birthdays and Christmas have come and gone, and I suspect we’ll be more likely to add more toys to the bins rather than take any out.