Time to Tidy Your Room? : The First Thing Is to Find Your Bed Under Dirty Clothes and Fungus

At first you don’t notice the mess. You go in and out of your bedroom, not once stopping to take a look at what you’ve created.

Then one day, your obsessively neat friend enters your room and passes out.

It is that day that you finally survey the toxic waste dump you call your room and decide (with some persuasive screaming from your parents) that some hard-core cleaning is in order.

The first five minutes is always the hardest.

The first task is trying to find your bed. You’re sure it’s somewhere inside the room, and that it is on the left side. Just when you think you’ve found it you realize that the pile is only dirty clothes. The smaller pile to the left is the bed.

It is covered with dirty socks, unironed shirts and jeans that haven’t been washed in so long that they are beginning to grow fungus. There’s also the English book you thought you lost last year and that cute guy’s phone number.

After cleaning off the bed down to the bedding, you realize your sheets either need to be washed in a hurry or they will soon be walking to the shower themselves.

Off they go, to be replaced by sheets that are actually clean, meaning no drink stains, no food droppings and no ink spots from late-night study sessions.

The next challenge is the floor. It seems the easiest way to tackle that chore is to first pick up all the clothes and set them near the washing machine, where Mom is sure to find them.

Even after the clothes are gone, there is still a 7-inch deep pile of junk that needs to be sorted.

Separate these items into three categories: shoes and accessories, books and trash.

After finding three pairs of shoes you thought had been stolen in the PE locker room as well as countless pairs of earrings, along with 17 books you’re sure you’ve never read and enough glasses and plates to start your own restaurant, you finally realize what color carpeting you have . . . and you don’t like it.

Then there’s the desk. Most people never really use their desks properly. They simply become areas to set down stuff you bring into the room. After a while, though, avalanche warning signs need to be posted.

The first thing to do in cleaning off your desk is to trash all outdated school papers, even those with sentimental value from the third grade. Having cleared away two feet of papers, you discover issues of magazines that date back to July, 1979, along with library books that are three years overdue.

Next you discover the fish tank, along with three perfectly preserved fish skeletons stuck to some plastic seaweed. At first glance, you recall promises made of cleaning out the tank every Saturday and feeding the fish ever morning and night. But that was before school began, and you got up too late and went to bed too late. Well, you can always use the tank as a massive piggy bank, especially since you found $14.67 in change beneath your bed.

As you’re flushing the remains of the fish, you hear a loud crash. You cringe as you find your closet has burst its doors and strewn even more clothes and junk all over your room.

Once again, you discover all those old stuffed animals and clothes you wore in elementary school, along with your skeleton costume from seventh-grade Halloween. At first you thought it was an old friend who had found a great hiding place during an ancient game of hide-and-seek, but then you remember she moved five years ago. Maybe it’s true after all, and everyone does have at least one in his or her closet.

Time to set about cleaning the dust and cobwebs off the walls. After a brush-down, you find a Strawberry Shortcake calendar from 1985. You quickly take it down and burn it before any of your friends have the chance to find it and use it against you.

You now find that you do, indeed, have a window. After 20 minutes of scrubbing and scouring, sunlight touches corners of the room that had been dark for eight years.

After only a weekend of work, you have a clean room.

Quick, take a picture while it’s still this way and hang the photo outside your door to remind yourself of what’s really supposed to be behind it. After all, it may never be that clean again now that school has started.