I have an extra room or two. One of these days I'll clean them out. Right now it's just storage for junk I would be better off throwing away.
Some unsolicited advice & a story: (for general posting, not specifically at you) Back in Boy Scouts, we helped a lady clean out her house. She was a hoarder & was going to get evicted by the town, so it turned into a community project because she was an older widow with no family & a bit off mentally. Worst thing I've ever experienced. I can still remember the smell like I was just in the house. Dead cat bodies everywhere. Crap piled up past my knees. I vowed to never get into that situation. I did end up with a crap room at one point, mostly computer parts & stuff, but it definitely was a complete disaster. Over time, I ended up learning a few things & making a system to deal with all of my personal belongings:
1. The difference between a hoarder & a collector is not much really, except a collector likes to show their stuff off & has a place for everything. Not saying that everyone is a hoarder, but an important lesson to learn here is that it's important to have a place for everything, especially one that you can actually get to. So the two initial keys are (1) everything needs a home, and (2) stuff needs to be accessible.
2. I call it a "room blueprint". Basically my cars, garage, house, etc. all have blueprints of what belongs in them & where. Then when you go to cleanup, it's super easy because you just have to revert the room back to the way it was, no questions about where stuff goes & no thinking required. If you have kids or grew up in a reasonably large family of more than few people, then you probably know that it's hard to live like that for an awful lot of people.
3. Basically, just make an inventory of all of your crap & where it is. First step is to do a full personal inventory of what you have, right now, and where it's located. A spreadsheet or Evernote or whatever is fine. That way, you don't have to deal with the mess by looking at it...you can make decisions based off a written list, which is a lot less overwhelming because people tend to mentally shut down when they see a huge pile of crap that they have to sort through, which equates to hundreds of decisions, which drains you mentally.
4. After you do your personal inventory, do a room-by-room blueprint. Furniture, knick-knacks, wall art, trash cans, etc.
5. Next, make a cleanup script. Mine is basically: pick up the laundry, then pick up the trash, then pick up the dishes, then put away toys, then pickup any other misc. crap, then vacuum or sweep/mop. So much easier to clean when you (1) know how the room is supposed to look, and (2) have a procedure to follow to clean it up. Again, that's more if you're a messy person, if your SO is, if you have kids or pets who make messes, etc. If you live by yourself & are OCD, chances are your house is already super-clean haha.
6. Next, go through your inventory list vs. your blueprints. This will determine what you want in your daily life vs. what needs to either go into storage or be chucked.
7. Looping back to #1, where we learned that everything needs a place to live (so when you clean up, it has a location to be put back to) & everything needs to be accessible. Here's my take on storage: it's
okay to store as much crap as you want, provided: (1) you have the room for it, (2) it's labeled, and (3) it's accessible. It's okay to get a storage unit (or three) if you really want to pay to store your stuff. There's nothing inherently bad with having a lot of stuff & a lot of people get a lot of joy from keeping stuff they're never going to use again. What IS bad is when it gets in the way of your usable living spaces, and when you lose track of what you have, lose track of where it is exactly, and can't get to it because it's not accessible. So you need the room for it, which means storing it in an attic, basement, garage, spare room, storage locker, whatever. You need it to be labeled. Preferably a physical label that is large & easy to read, as well as a log of it in your Google docs spreadsheet or OneNote folder or whatever, so you can remember that you have it, look it up in your notes, and then go find it easily. Everyone has random stuff that is only used sometimes...beach stuff, camping stuff, tailgating stuff, luggage, holiday decorations, etc. Buy some thick tote bins with lids from Home Depot, build some cheap shelves, get some 3x5" cards & tape & a sharpie to label everything, and voila!
What that results in is that you have clean, usable living spaces (which are easy to manage thanks to cleanup scripts & everything having a home, so it's easy to put stuff away without having to think about it), and all of the crap you want to store is labeled & accessible so you know where it is & can actually get to it. It's a huge project up-front because you have to do a lot of decision-making, but then it's easy to maintain because anything new you buy or acquire simply gets added to either your living spaces blueprint or your archived storage. Also really useful for insurance purposes if you have a flood or fire or whatever, because then you have a complete list of everything you own!
I've seen a million ways to do get your home organized, everything from the "Fly Lady" to "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up", but it pretty much just boils down to deciding what you want to live with, getting organized with your storage, and then having some cleanup routines to return things to spec every day. I never have to do mountains of crusty dishes because doing the dishes is part of my bedtime routine. When I get home, I throw in the laundry & set my iPhone timer to remind me to switch, and I do a different pile every day (ex. Mondays are towels, Tuesdays are my clothes, Wednesdays are bedding, etc.). Automation is amazing. It's life-changing because then you're not dealing with lots of crap, avoiding areas of your house because there's too many decisions to be made about what to do with the stuff in them, and nothing ever piles up because you're just doing small bites instead of dealing with big piles.
I talked about this in another thread recently...I read this article on Obama from I think Fast Company about how he only owns two colors of suits because he has to deal with decision fatigue & wanted to automate that process out of his thinking. Funeral? Black suit. Charity event? Blue suit. Black-tie event? Black suit. Very simple. I think in that thread I mentioned gassing up my cars...I've never broken my wife of the habit of filling up at empty, so instead I fill up both cars twice a week...mine is Monday/Thursdays & I leave a few minutes early before work to top hers off on Tuesdays/Fridays. Both cars are always filled up for errands, being late to places, emergencies, storms, etc. & I just never have to worry about it. Remove decision fatigue through recurring scheduled "appointments" to do quick little tasks like that. Combine that with a house & car "blueprints", labeled & accessible storage, and cleanup scripts tied into your routine or scheduled on your calendar & boy does it make life a lot easier!
Anyway, end of spiel. I had a hard time for a long time being "organized" & finally figured this crap out, at least for my own personal living situation. Hugely freeing to do smaller amounts of work every day & never have to deal with big pile-ups of laundry, dishes, messy rooms (especially emergency cleaning when you have visitors coming over haha), empty gas tanks, rooms & garages full of piles of stuff that give you a headache just looking at, etc.