YES, it’s a cliché for this time of year, but a serious amount of decluttering has been going on in our house.

Rather than being a new year thing, however, it has been necessitated by a home improvement we have been having done which forced some serious clearing up and clearing out.

We have had our internal garage converted into a room, a project we initially commenced because we thought that there was going to be a new addition to our family.

Then, of course, he died, and a few weeks after that all happened, the builders moved in to start work. As such, I have had mixed feelings about this space and the reasons why we initially decided to create it.

Now we tell people it’s going to be a playroom for our four year-old, which it will be, but they’re probably thinking, ‘for goodness’ sake - how much room does one small child need?’

The creation of this room has meant, of course, that the entire previous contents of our garage have had to be absorbed into the main body of the house.

And, if you’re anything like us, you’ll know just how much you can accumulate in such a place.

In addition to bikes, camping equipment and DIY bits and bobs, it was also full of old carpet, cardboard boxes from when we moved, baby equipment, toys our daughter had grown out of - and a large family of ginormous spiders. Shudder.

Some of it was moved to the shed, some of it went to the dump and a lot of the nice stuff went to local charity shops.

We have hung on to the majority of the baby equipment for practical reasons, but, for me, all of those bits linger in the back bedroom like a spectre.

Every time I leave our bathroom, I catch a glimpse of the dismantled cot up against the wall and, even though I know it’s silly, I feel a little stab of something.

Some times I feel so furious that I could lash out and kick it – isn’t that crackers.

One thing the work has achieved is that it has forced us to tackle a serious area of untidiness. It’s too easy with a garage or similar storage space to open a door, chuck something in there and forget about it – possibly indefinitely – all of which stores up a huge problem for yourself or someone else in the future.

We have been confronted by our clutter and have had to properly sort it out, much of it in a permanent way.

Instead of me thinking, oh we might use that, I have made final decisions about much of it.

By refining the amount of stuff in our house, we’re hoping to avoid a situation where we’ll have so much clutter that there will barely be room for the three of us and, as we say in Northern Ireland, we’ll end up on the outside looking in.