My Stepson's Bedroom is Where Crap Comes for Retirement

I give up. We’ve had L for 3 weeks of the 6-week school holidays, and during that time I have asked, pleaded, demanded and chucked hissy fits in an effort to get him to cull his toy stash. Why yes, yes I am the stepmonster from hell and no... I do not care.

We moved into this house in May of last year. The house has 4 bedrooms. 3 down one end of the house, and one small one off the lougeroom. When I say small, I mean narrow and quite tiny and closed in. We decided this would be L’s room for several reasons:
1. He is 9 years old. He’s getting too old to be in a room that shares a wall with his father and stepmother’s room. Trust me on this one, no-one wants him there. Him included.
2. The room may be small, but during the majority of the year year he’s here weekends only (sometimes every second weekend). How much time, realistically, will he spend in it?
3. At his mother’s, he shares a room with his 6 year old sister. This teeny tiny room is still a step-up.
4. I refused to relinquish the bedroom next to ours for him. It is the baby’s room. It has an attached ‘sleep out’ which I use as a photography studio and it has a window in the door so I’ll be able to work and monitor baby at the same time.

All of these reasons are totally viable, and L loves his room. He has O’s bunk beds (god knows why) so it’s like living in a fort. However, the top bunk, which when O used them housed some precious stuffed toys and a shelf with her ‘pretties’. Now the top bunk is crap storage. Underneath the bed is crap storage. The cupboards and drawers I arranged in there for clothes are all crap storage, as are the toyboxes and his desk.

I wonder if Mama Berenstain threatened to throw her kids' DS out the window if the room got messy? It works!
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Don't get me wrong. The room is something resembling tidy, because he has the fear of God and Stepmother struck into him. These is a sign on his door detailing the infractions for which he will have to pick the pieces of his DS up off the road. The room is tidy, because the crap is hidden.

L's Face whenever I suggest culling
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Before we moved, I was talked out of flinging a metric f*ck-tonne of toys I believed to be too young for L or too broken for usefulness, with B telling me it was up to him to go through his own toys and clothes and get rid of what had to go. Not a week has gone by since that I haven’t sent him back to his room to TAKE OFF THE THREE SIZES TOO SMALL T-SHIRT. I’ve ranted and raved and made piles of too-small clothes, which L then rescues and shoves back in his drawers.

Since Christmas, I’ve become increasingly aware of how many toys he has. Not because he’s playing with everything he got for Christmas. Because almost everything he got for Christmas has spent the ENTIRE SUMMER HOLIDAY sitting in its’ original boxes while he’s spent 2 hours a day playing with magnetix he's had since he was 4. He has 2 toyboxes and 4 sets of drawers/cupboards FULL OF TOYS! 

Everytime I rant about this, he and his father spend 20min in his room. He cries crocodile tears and his father gives up. I throw my hands up in a huff and try very hard not to scream.

Every so often, B gets daring enough to bring up how many toys/books/clothes O has. Snarly bitchwife takes the time to snarl sweetly point out that not only does O live in this house FULL FREAKING TIME,  but she plays with ALL her toys. She may not have seen something in a month, but she’ll get a random hankering for it and drag it out of its’ toybox for a good deal of lovin’. I’m sure at her Daddy’s house she has half the toys she does here (and if she has an many as she has here, not my issue) but for the amount of time L spends here, he has an inordinate amount of crap, and that is my issue.

The only upside to the realisation that all the crap exists, and is in no hurry to leave my house? I’m not going to feel the guilt for Christmas and Birthday this year. We spent a stupid amount of both our kids for special events this year just gone, and the reality of how much plastic shit ended up in our house has hit home. In 2013, we’re living simply. Clothes, books and PJ’s, one or two special toys MAYBE. But covering my whole lounge room in packages on Christmas eve, and not being able to move for unwrapped presents and wrapping paper on Christmas day? The adding to it with whatever my family buys them? HELL NO.