You've got two categories: the stuff being brought home for keeps, and the stuff that is homework, that has to circulate back. For the first, you have to consider whether to keep. The teacher gets through the day, and the kids often (not always) learn by doing things with paper, and once the projects have served both those functions, those papers will have served the purpose they are in the world for and can go. There are precious little artworks or journal pages in there that really express your children and that you may want to keep, but most can go. Problem is, I could never really distinguish when I was in the thick of it coming home - I had to wait a few years, or at least to year end. Your best friend, in my opinion: plastic boxes. Just pry open the lid, slip in this week's batch, close and forget for now. The boxes don't have to live in the hallway - the kids could put their stack of paper in their cubbies, or in those wall files, and it could be transferred once a week to their box - in the basement or something. The inevitable homework that accidentally gets mixed in with the keeping stuff can be easily retrieved. The wrought iron wall files will look like he(( stuffed, but maybe if you empty them once a week you'll enjoy them nonetheless. Jannie: gotta love it - mine's 19, and I am sure I have stuff of similar vintage. KarinL

Glad you take time to not butcher up your wiring but you're over-thinking it just a bit. It is not the electrician's responsibility to worry about incompetent people working in the future. Most professional electricians wire multi-gang switch boxes with often even 3 or more circuits in one box and if a clueless person decided to take it all apart without labeling the connections, they could wind up with 240 dead shorts, lights using wrong neutrals... All of that would be their own fault. Capping off the white is better in this scenario. Some electricians chose to label cables in the boxes, you could take a 2 inch piece of romex sheath and slip it over the black, red, and white wires and label it "garage light, breaker ##" As far as inspectors, it is difficult for them to have enough time to check for 14 and 12 wire on a same circuit, make sure the kitchen has the correct circuits, see if romex through bored holes is atleat 1&1/4" from the face of the stud, much less for them to do a complete circuit analysis. Having dead ended wires in a box is nothing that would surprise them. Happens all the time with wire for a ceiling fan that ends up not using the red or switch loops wired to have an automation switch that requires a white neutral. If normal switches are used, the whites would be capped off for future use. G

. . . which is like a cast stone material. Maybe someone here will have the answer. If not, I would get on internet and find a company that sells cleaners for stone products. I just did some googling, and found the Cast Stone Institute that has all sorts of documents on line. StoneTech has a line of stone cleaners and a help line. StoneTech

I'm going to take a different tack. After nearly a decade as a wellness nurse in an independent living retirement community, I see this as a safety issue. Throw rugs aside (well known fall risk), you should be able to theoretically walk around with a yard stick across your waist and not touch any furnishings. If you can't maintain this three foot clearance, then it's too cluttered and unsafe. Clear passages with no trip/fall hazards is a crucial part of home safety as an older person attempts to age in place. One fall can change the trajectory of a life in an instant. There are many good home safety checklists available online with helpful tips and pertinent information (cdc.gov and ncoa.org-the national council on aging are just two). Beyond the safety issue, as a daughter who spent four months clearing out my parents' home (three story home and two story garage) after the death of my mother in 2013 (my father had died ten years earlier), please purge papers and at least some extraneous belongings now. My sister and I had a paper trail going back to the 1930s to review/trash/shred. Our parents dearly loved us and yet we were driven to tears at times that so much stuff had been saved over the decades (and never looked at in the garage attic or house attic again) that we had to physically haul out and either attempt to sell (nearly always unsuccessful), take to Goodwill or the county dump. That experience absolutely changed both of us and we resolved to never put our own children in this position-we've taken steps to purge our own papers and belongings and are much more hesitant when buying more "things."