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Which character more resembles you?

A) Martha Stewart, weaving her own carpets from dryer lint, then dyeing them with berries grown in a greenhouse she built using discarded toothpicks.

B) Homer Simpson, lying in his underwear, eating pork rinds he found under the couch cushions, while the kids throw candy wrappers on the floor and Marge reads a magazine: Better Homes Than Yours.

If you answered "A," you don't have time to read any further. You have to tie holiday bows onto every piece of silverware you own. The "B" group probably would prefer to remain anonymous. That leaves most of us somewhere inbetween, in a world that doesn't appreciate housekeeping and then wonders why we feel so restless.

The main enemy is not Twinkie stains in the Berber carpet or tarnished silver chafing dishes. It's clutter. Conquer clutter and your trophy will be an orderly, inviting home that offers a husband and wife refuge from everything outside of it.

At our house, my wife and I recently declared war on clutter. Possibly because just sitting in the family room to watch TV or read a book required a ten-minute clean-up job, just to clear enough space to sit. Or, maybe it was because every one of those debris piles represented another Hefty bag in a growing landfill of unspoken resentment—sometimes toward each other, sometimes toward the kids, sometimes toward the invisible elves who make those messes and then fool us into blaming the kids.

Thus far, the war is at a standoff, with both sides holding ground. We've come up with new and better ways to store everything from canned peaches to paint tarps, but only just now are we realizing that our problem is less about storage than it is about hanging on to useless junk.

I write this from a home office piled with fifteen years worth of Sports Illustrated magazines; four shoeboxes overstuffed with hundreds of unsorted, unlabeled snapshots; and heavy, once-expensive textbooks I haven't touched since college. Sitting down to write at the computer required clearing a pile of medical receipts off of the chair and a larger pile of my kids' school reports from the desk. The office is our next battleground.

We cleaned our kitchen cabinets recently and found twenty coffee mugs promoting newspapers, colleges, banks, and even the 1984 Olympics. No one in our family even drinks coffee. Out went eighteen of the mugs.

From the basement came several twenty-gallon plastic tote boxes stuffed with ribbon, yarn, and fabric. Also the exercise contraption, available at finer garage sales everywhere. Out.

Still behind the garage, covered with a sheet, rests the old washing machine that I was too cheap to pay Sears twenty dollars to haul away when they delivered the new one. It's going soon.

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