The Exhausted Dad: Be our guest… after a purge and deep, deep clean

Visitors provide motivation for long-ignored home projects.

Living with four school-aged children also means living with all their stuff. I already filled the house with my stuff. I made just enough room for the children and their beds; there’s no more space for anything else. If I had the money, I’d buy the neighbor’s house just so it could be a giant closet for my kids’ clothes, toys and, well, straight garbage.

My kids don’t like to waste reusable garbage. Amazon boxes are blank canvases. Same with toilet paper tubes. And thousands of pages of school worksheets, art projects and rejected doodles.

When I come across a piece of paper with a single, half-drawn stick figure on it, I make sure to toss it in the recycle bin when the kids aren’t looking. Because if they see me, they’ll fish it out of the bin.

“Don’t, Dad! I can use the other side of that!”

I applaud the recycling efforts. Really. But I’m paying for the garbage services and I’d really like to see my bare living room floor again.

My wife and I are objectively part of the problem, as we both feel that certain writing samples and revered art projects should be preserved. Just how many drawings should I keep from when my youngest son first learned how to draw a stick figure? Apparently 800. I guess I thought his 2-year-old scribbles would be valuable relics in a future, world-renowned career in fine art.

Rather than fill our house to the brim with papers, my wife and I now try to take pictures and digitize the art before said papers get lost, damaged and, yes, finally, thrown away. We don’t pay for a storage locker for physical stuff; we just pay for the biggest subscription to the digital cloud.

Nevertheless, the stuff piles up: Children’s books that nobody in the house reads anymore. Thousands of tiny rubber bands (to make rubber band bracelets, duh). Multiple sets of the exact same Paw Patrol action figure (It’s a clone; Rubble on the Double!).

We’re a messy family with too much junk. We accept it. Well, we choose to live with it anyway.

BUT. Then you invite some family to visit for Labor Day weekend. Forget where they’re going to sleep. Where are they even going to sit?!

One of our cousins and his family stayed with us for a couple days last week. Four extra people in our already cluttered house meant a deep clean and purge was required.

We’ve had a few visitors here and there over the past few years. One or two grandparents at the house is manageable. A friend can sleep on a pretty-comfy couch (so long as we push away all the Pokémon and Uno cards).

But FOUR people? It’s either a purge or we’re springing to accommodate them at a nearby hotel.

In the 48 hours prior to their arrival, this entire family busted our backs trying to Make this House Livable Again (MHLA doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). The kids didn’t want to help, obviously. But they did want their little cousins to stay with them. Their rooms had to be clean enough to make room for our visitors. Plus, yes, we bribed them with McDonald’s and treats.

We easily filled a dozen bags of donations — mostly clothes, toys and books the kids surprisingly admitted to not needing anymore. I was so proud of them, especially because kids (and their parents) struggle with letting go of things attached to memories of earlier years. Take a picture!

We filled even more bags for trash. The modified Amazon boxes, the stick-figure scribbles, the literal mounds of scratch paper clippings, useless toy packaging materials and toilet paper tube characters. And I couldn’t believe how much straight trash we bagged away… paper, cardboard and plastic that wasn’t involved in any form of art project.

With all of us working together, we made a livable space for our guests. Well, at least for the first part of the weekend. There were SIX kids in the house instead of four, so the messes messed faster than usual. Give us another 48 hours to deep clean and we can probably host again. Actually, no, nevermind. It’s OUR turn to visit THEM.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.