My wife and I have in common a distaste for clutter, but last Sunday put to test our personal purging skills.

In a nutshell, purging is hard because it’s difficult to know what to keep and what to let go. And how do I know some bolt or electronic component I can’t identify won’t once again reveal its utility? This is why we have charger cords to iPods, cameras and other devices we haven’t used since smartphones came along.

If it were easy, Maria Kondo wouldn’t have made a name for herself, at least not by helping people declutter and get organized.

I do have a tendency to hold on to skateboards, shoes and T-shirts, but otherwise, I’ve been vigilant in my efforts to avoid incipient hoarding tendencies. I grew up stubbing my toes in a house crammed with stuff due to my mother, whose avocation was antiques collecting, and whose vocation was antiques dealing, which means she was a full spectrum keeper of old stuff and would surely have met or exceeded even the most stringent of hoarder qualification tests.

Still. Unless you never buy anything and accept no gifts, to live in the U.S. is to accumulate stuff. I don’t even know where it comes from. It just materializes. I always intend to get rid of, say, one shirt when another enters my dresser drawers, but it’s easy to just skip it, too.

As my friend Matt put it when we were skating later on Sunday, “I hate purging,” he said, adding that stuff he’s not using isn’t hurting anything. That’s usually where I land, too.

As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, my wife has been helping clean out her mother’s home in Illinois, preparing it to be put up for sale. I did a bit of the same when my mom moved out of her longtime home in 2014.

But Catherine’s task has led her, quite naturally, to return to Bend with an eye on ridding ourselves of things we don’t need, and perhaps finally converting our three adult daughters’ bedrooms into something other than de facto storage for childhood remnants, mostly books, clothing and furniture they didn’t take to their apartments in other cities.

I have at least one friend whose cluttered home made him laugh when I told him what we were working on: The amount of stuff in our empty nest is nothing compared to this friend, who still has kids living at home.

Some years ago, a friend from Portland visited and admired how neatly we’d stored and hung things on shelves and hooks along the walls of our garage. By my reckoning, it was a mess given how haphazardly a bike was hanging from the ceiling here, another leaning against a wall there. Then again, we almost always manage to park two cars in there. When you get a peek at most people’s garages in my neighborhood, it’s either been converted into an airy second living room, or it’s crammed ceiling high with stuff.

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There is a smug satisfaction in opening the garage and backing out without having to scrape the windshield in colder months, I will concede that. I’ll also concede that the people who have second living rooms probably have better social lives than I, and the hoarders are probably sitting on a garage sale gold mine.

Our stuff ends up, if it has any value, on Facebook Marketplace, the free box in a staff room at my wife’s workplace or Goodwill. And when it’s devoid of use or redemption, it goes on a car ride with our guilty consciences to Knott Landfill.

On Sunday, we tackled a few things on our decluttering list, including our garage, which is back in two-car shape after a couple of months full of two of our kids’ belongings while they studied abroad.

But the really big project was what we call the “entertainment center,” a behemoth cabinet that looms near our dining area.

It’s a large, upright wooden cabinet that a landlord saddled us with in the late ‘90s. It has at different stages held our TV and stereo, a printer and gadgetry. At one point, it even served as a sort of dresser for one of our three daughters until she rejected it and back downstairs it moved.

Now it houses a mixture of anything and everything from pens and pencils and small tools and files and paper and you get the idea. It’s somewhat amazing when you start going through a monolith containing years of belongings, how difficult the task of cleaning it out is.

Just going through the sheer number of pens, pencils, crayons, magic and permanent markers and dry-erase markers was a fairly Herculean, morning-devouring effort. Five people will accumulate a LOT of writing implements, apparently: new pencils every school year, along with half-used ones that outlived their eraser. Pens that migrated to a house in a reporter’s pocket. Any number of promotional pens from various hotels and businesses.

As Catherine said, combing through the clutter in order to dispose of is a mixture of nostalgia, postponed decision-making and I forget the third thing she said, but I would edit in, a fight against laziness.

Because on the one hand, I’m with Matt: Purging is hard, and our stuff isn’t hurting anything where it is. Is it?

On the other hand, if I squint toward the future with anything resembling 20-20 vision, I know that postponed decisions about the stuff we’ve kept might someday mean my own kids resentfully combing through our junk, talking trash and trying to figure out why the hell we hung on to a VCR, old iPod cables, chewed-up pencils and pens that hardly write anymore.

So purge we must, if purge we can.