So there’s Christmas gone for another year, along with all the space in your house. Our resident Dad, Pat Fitzpatrick, guides you through the minefield of decluttering a house that’s jam packed with a new shipment of toys.

1. The Floor of Death

Ah Christmas, a time when Chinese kids make toys for your kids that fall apart after 10 minutes. Add when an army of Aunties, who can’t decide which of these cheap gizmos to buy at the queue in Penneys, just end up buying them all. The result? By early January, the floors in your house are a sea of doll-heads and wheels. Stoop down for a look and you’ll end up kneeling on fake Lego. This is more painful than being eaten by a shark. (You had the ‘flu’ over Christmas and overdid it on the moaning front. It’s OK, we all did.) The solution? Hire one of those industrial vacuum cleaners and clear the floor in half an hour. The crunching sound is immensely satisfying.

2. The Bike

Face it. She didn’t want a bike. There was no way of knowing this before Christmas. Didn’t she hug it in Smyths and everything, and even gave it a name? The problem wasn’t really with the bike. The problem is you bought a Frozen dress in Aldi on Christmas Eve, just in case. Anyway, she’s worn the dress for 15 days solid since Christmas and won’t go near her main present because Ice Queens haven’t time for cycling. (It’s obvious when you think about it.) So now you have to squeeze the bike into your chaotic shed. Which is a balls, because you were hoping you wouldn’t have to face into Shed-Clearing until March at the earliest. There’s another weekend gone now.

3. The Wardrobe

The problem with cleaning up isn’t knowing when to start. It’s knowing when to stop. What starts out as an attempt to rationalise the toy situation ends up with your wife in your bedroom shouting “Do you really need seven shirts?”. The correct response to this is “No, throw out whatever you want.” Unfortunately, you have given up chocolate for January and are therefore mad for a fight. So you shout “About as much as you need eighteen tops that don’t really fit you anymore.” Jesus, what were you thinking? It started out as an attempt to clear the front room. It ended up in family court.

4. The Attic

The main thing you need to throw out for a tidy house? The pull-down stairs for your attic. Why? The First Law of Keeping Stuff Forever. It states that the amount of garbage in your gaff is directly proportional to the quality of access to your attic. Put another way, it’s hard to drag an old lawnmower up a rickety ladder. You want to make it harder, not easier to keep stuff. Now, if you’re like me, you probably harbour notions of disappearing up to the attic for the weekend, to watch illegal streams of soccer matches on that android TV box you bought from Dodgy Dave. However, it’s hard to escape into your man-mind when surrounded by boxes of old onesies, kept in case ye decide to have another child. So throw out those stairs, and seal up the attic.

5. The Books

Your kids probably got a raft of new books for Christmas. Just as well. There aren’t any surprises left in The Gruffalo after reading it 1,142 times. (The Gruffalo? Why didn’t you know? It’s a charming book that goes like so.) Anyway, this is an ideal time to clear out some old books. So you sit down and start going through the pile. (Rule 1 of tidying up. Never dump anything without written permission from her indoors.) The net result is you end up throwing out no books. Zero. Not even the one about the fox and the butterfly that reads like it was translated from Chinese by a four-year-old Portuguese hamster. You see, it still has that bit of Sophie’s puke on page 3. You can still kind of smell it if you stick your nose right in. Aaaw. Let’s buy a new book case.

6. The Storage Boxes

Damn you, big supermarket chains. First, you trick us into buying a ton of toys that our kids don’t want by luring us into your shop with gorgeous wine at amazing prices. Knowing how this pans out, you replace these toys in the new year with rows of storage boxes for these freshly unloved toys. So now our house is ceiling high with empty storage boxes. We’re too sad to fill them up with rubbish because we gave up your gorgeous wine at amazing prices for January. The upshot is we need a bigger house. Is there any chance you can stock one of those? (Probably. Nothing is off limits when it comes to property in Ireland.)

7. Help!

According to some parenting experts, it’s never too early to involve your kids in chores around the house. Here’s what we know about these experts. They most likely don’t have kids themselves. Anyway, here is what happens if you ask your kids to play some role in the great clear out. Nothing. Kids are incredibly sentimental, which is weird because most of them don’t drink wine. You’ll struggle to throw away that 5.99 train set that nearly took Jack’s hand off. “But it’s got my blood on it”, says Jack, weeping his little nostalgic tears. The bottom line on the toy clear out. Send them to their aunt’s house, and hire a skip.

8. The Junk

What’s the fastest thing in January? The relation running out your front door after leaving three boxes of biscuits for you as a ‘present’ because they can’t bring themselves to throw them in the bin. There’s no way I’ll eat all of that, says everyone, at first.

Love this? Share, share, share! Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and our brand new Snapchat is eumom_ie