What finally got me to do this: the TV was in a suboptimal place, and Elder Child wanted a new games console for their birthday, but I didn't want to connect it up with the TV where it was, so that gave me a deadline.

(Oh, and I finally took down the dratted Christmas tree that's been up for nearly two years, so that was a bonus of all of this.)

While moving things out of the living room and back in again, I

• threw away a lot of literal rubbish, and put a lot of paper recycling in the recycling bin
• culled a storage box of assorted activity books in pristine condition of everything that Younger Child is definitely too old for, which meant I could lift the box to move it (it's still at least half full, that is a problem for another day)
• threw away the giant plastic housings from a bunch of DVD box sets my friend gave away to me 18 months ago (and we still haven't watched), which means I needed less space to store the actual DVDs, which needed a new home, because they had been stashed in the TV stand where the new console needed to go
• made space for the DVDs by emptying a shelf of jigsaws for young children that we've been meaning to sort through for literal years

Then, after everything was back in place, I spent a cheerful couple of hours doing all of the little jigsaws to confirm they were all complete, while listening to my offspring play cooperatively on the new console. My SIL has claimed the assorted Frozen and Moana ones for my youngest nibling, the rest I will give to the charity shop. Some of them were so old and battered I decided it was time to bin them rather than inflict them on anyone else.

Goals for the weekend:

• Take the bags I unearthed of textile recycling to the nearest recycling point
• Take the bags of jigsaws and pristine activity/sticker books to the charity shop
• Parcel up the jigsaws for my nibling, and for bonus points get the parcel posted
• Consider some rounds of Dana K White 5-step decluttering on the shelves that tempted me with scope creep