How do you know it’s time when to clean your house?

Well, one of the first signs that you need to clean your house is that the editors of Hurricane Digest come over to your house and they want to take pictures. You see, there was a massive hurricane in one part of the world, and it wiped out everything and they weren’t able to show such devastation, so they go into people’s homes and they take pictures of corners, dining room tables, extra bedrooms, closets.

You also know it’s time to clean out your house when you open a closet and something falls on your head.

You know it’s time to clean out your house when, in the middle of the night, you have to go to the bathroom and you forgot to get some water, and as you walk out of the bedroom, you stub your toe and it bleeds.

Why?

Because something that shouldn’t be there is there.

You know it’s time to clean your house when you’re laying on the ground and you’re stretching and a bag full of things that you don’t really want falls on your head, and happens to give you a four inch cut.

You know it’s time to clean your house when your furniture starts mismatching, and you think to yourself, why did I keep that chair from my shabby chic days from the 1990s?

You know it’s time to clean your closet when all of the sudden, you’ve got all these clothes, and some of the stuff looks like you would be in a Vanilla Ice video.

You know it’s time to clean out your house when you’ve got all these products on your bathroom shelf, yet you only use three or four of them. The other ones are just there for display, just in case another packrat comes over and wants to hang out and feel at home.

You know it’s time to clean your house when you open the refrigerator, and the only thing you see is old dressing and ketchup together is the crust around the edges. You know that crust that seems to grow? That wonderful crust that when you open something out, you just need to rinse it in hot water because the crust falls to the ground because the sugar that was in that ketchup or dressing tends to just get all emulsified at the top.

You know it’s time to clean your refrigerator out when even the mold has expired.

What about your cabinets?

You know it’s time to clean them out when the cereal boxes have actually faded, even though there’s no direct sunlight in there, there’s actually fading because everything you open it up, it gets a little bit of light, and the expiration date was four or five years ago. You might be able to recycle those corn flakes to use as paper, but eating it might make you sick.

You know it’s time to clean your house out when you have a closet full of dog toys and you haven’t had a dog in 10 years.

You know it’s time to clean out your kid’s room when they’ve been away for college for the last six years and you still have their little stuffed animal from when they were two.

It’s time to clean your life out.

You look around your house and see bags of things with clothes piled to the ceiling.

I don’t know why they’re piled to the ceiling, I don’t know why they’re even there. If you’ve got bags of stuff that need to be returned, yet you haven’t returned it in over a year, I’d love to be the person at the store that saw you coming in.

“Hi, I’d like to return this. Oh, we haven’t had this style in like four years. Oh, I’m well aware of that.”

I really believe that you take everything back. Well we do, but it was marked down to like $1. Well, that’s okay, I’ll take a dollar.

Because obviously my time per hour is not worth more than donating this thing that I bought that never looked good on me in the first place.

You know it’s time to start doing these things when your house starts to look like the Goodwill donation center on a crowded Sunday.

When people come over to your house and they don’t know where to put their coat, so they just throw it on top of what looks like a donation pile in the corner.

You know it’s time to clean your house out when you look around and it feels like an entire hurricane has gone off in it.