My wife Kaye and I have lived in our current home for 37 years — and this year, we’re moving! I’m excited about the new house we’ve chosen nearby, but there’s one thing I didn’t bargain for when we started browsing real estate listings: the 37-year-old piles of stuff in our current house that need to be cleaned up.

Kaye and I started cleaning just before Christmas after climbing into our little-used attic for the first time in years. We were on the hunt for a wooden doll crib my father-in-law made 40 years ago. We wanted to give it to our granddaughter for Christmas, and it had been in the attic for at least 20 years!

Eventually, we dug it up entirely covered in dust. We also found my mother-in-law’s golf bag, which Kaye estimates she stored away up there 15 years ago. That discovery kicked off what I’m guessing will be a seven- month spring-cleaning project, starting with our daughters’ bedrooms.

We raised all three of our girls in this house, and their bedrooms upstairs still hold remnants of their childhoods. There are probably 25–50 hangers filled with clothes in each of their bedrooms. Kaye always reminds them to look through those clothes when they visit so that they can save anything they’d like before we give it away, but they never do it. Now their time is up! We’re in the process of going bedroom-by-bedroom and choosing what to keep.

Kaye is taking the lead on the cleaning process, but I pitch in on nights and weekends. There’s also one place in the house that requires my personal attention: my office. I have a four-drawer filing cabinet and two lateral cabinets stuffed full of years of reports and other paperwork. There are 15-year-old insurance policies, ancient equipment calibration reports, and plenty of other things I don’t need. Just last year, I invited a shredding company to our house to shred 28 boxes of files while I watched, and I’ll probably have another 28 ready by the time I’m done cleaning!