Remember when comedian George Carlin first called a house a place for your stuff? I�ve been thinking more and more about that description in the past couple months as I�ve continued to weed out disused, unneeded and unwanted items from our home.

My most recent triumph was consolidating my daughter�s worldly possessions into her bedroom, rather than allowing toys and craft projects, books and papers to take over her "playroom" (which most people would use as a living room).

It�s amazing. We�ve gained a whole (nearly empty) room. Without building an addition or buying a bigger house. Just by storing or passing along or throwing away stuff.

We live in a time when whatever we want, whatever we can imagine, if we can afford it, we can buy it. Internet searches, specialty catalogs, mega-malls. Somewhere, somehow it�s out there.

A few years ago I attended a talk given by Helen Volk, an Albany area consultant whose business, Beyond Clutter, aims to help people manage their stuff. As she pointed out, each new possession�even a rock-bottom bargain�has an additional price tag in terms of time and money to store, repair and maintain.

More clothes lead to more laundry, ironing and mending. Also, more hangers or other storage containers.

More knickknacks mean it takes longer to dust.

More photographs require the purchase�and use�of more photo albums or storage boxes.

I�d someday like a hot tub, but even if we could afford it and could make a place for it today, I�d have to be honest and say that I�m not really ready for the extra upkeep it would take.

My philosophy about money ("You tend to spend what you make.") is similar to how I feel about house size: You tend to fill up what you�ve got. Unless you continue to purge as you buy, eventually you�re going to run out of room.

Perhaps it�s human nature to think, "Hmmm. I better keep that. I might need it someday." After all, when you figure in the additional cost�in money as well as time�of having to go out and buy a duplicate item, it�s easy to conclude that it�s better to just hold on to the original.

If your house is so cluttered that you can�t find the item when you really do need it, what�s the difference? You might as well not have it at all.

I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment and there wasn�t a lot of room to store extras. My mother taught me to be efficient in deciding what to keep and what to toss. "Have you used it in the past year? Are you likely to use it in the next year?" were the major questions she asked when things started getting a little too crowded.

In contrast, my mother-in-law, like many people who lived through the Great Depression, raised her children to "waste not, want not". She seemed to have saved everything. I once found a badminton shuttlecock in her large, wooden fold-out sewing chest, even though it�d been a decade or more since anyone in the house had strung up a net in the backyard. I started to give her a ribbing about this but stopped when she observed that my daughter, a toddler at the time, was enjoying it as a toy.

It�s hard to argue against something that�s keeping a child quiet and amused, but I still thought that it was an odd thing to have stored in a sewing box all those years.

The more often you move, the easier it is to keep extra stuff to a minimum, especially if you�re doing the heavy lifting yourself. After six years of moving every year or two, we finally settled in one spot. Once we passed the three-year mark, the real accumulation began. Eventually, more things came into our house than left it.

Now that I�m close to weeding out every room in the house, I know it will be a continual process not to get it cluttered up again.

Just after I helped my daughter go through her stuff, I was grocery shopping at Hannaford�s and my eye caught a neat Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle that I knew she�d like. There were actually several scenes to choose from and I at first wanted to by two of them. Then, I narrowed it down to just one. As I finished the rest of my shopping I thought about the two other unopened jigsaw puzzles she owns. By the time I reached the registers I�d decided it wouldn�t be too instructive of me to add another one to the collection.

I put it back on the shelf.

Whether you live in a studio apartment or a grand mansion, it�s all just "a place for your stuff." Then again, the same can be said for rental storage rooms, not to mention warehouses and museums. I guess it�s what you do with your stuff that matters the most.