I have house rules for keeping down clutter. Here they are:

1. No stacks of books on the floor. If we don't have shelf space for it, we can't keep it.

2. One filing cabinet. If a document cannot find a place in the four-drawer legal-size filing cabinet in the study, dispose of it appropriately (burn, shred or recycle), or dispose of old papers until it does.

3. Acquire no household item, whether it is furniture, clothing, china, glassware, tools, or cooking equipment, that increases the contents of the house. Anything that comes in the door must be something we have an immediate use for and space to store.

4. Dispose of all unwanted items quickly: to the church bazaar (annual, for good stuff), or the Goodwill, if serviceable; or to the trash if not. Harden the heart and make it go away.

5. Don't have "collections" -- stuff accumulated just because it's an example of a certain kind of stuff. The house is a home, not a museum.

These are iron rules that give rise to angst and argument, but on the whole even Himself the merry shopper accepts that we have to live by them. We both have enough experience with packrat friends and relatives to know that the slippery slope to household chaos begins with stepping over or around that thing we can't quite deal with right now and somehow never get around to.