Neat and Tidy: Attack of the Spring Cleaning Androids

Sometimes, I like to pretend that I'm rich and live in a nice house with a full-time cleaning crew. Usually, somewhere between my rosy-cheeked children running outdoors to play in solid white, perfectly ironed play clothes and my husband bringing me a dozen red roses while wearing his "Kiss the Cook" barbecue apron, reality intrudes and I get woken from my daydream by a small child crying.
Then I look around me and realize that I was, indeed, dreaming.

I feel as if I'm on a never-ending cleaning cycle in my house. The problems are many; the issues real.

1) The house is basically a two-story hallway. Long and narrow, the furniture placement becomes very awkward. This in turn results in the entire house becoming one giant hallway and the furniture becomes another place to toss stuff in passing.
2) There is little storage. Very little. This house was built in the 1800's and is on the National Historic Register. What little storage there is is, like the house, narrow and small and awkwardly placed.
3) We're renting. This means I can't knock out a wall or add hooks to the walls to hang items up. When combined with issues 1 and 2, it makes for a big mess.

I have a plan, though. Spring Cleaning is a big task to me. Every year, no matter where we are living currently, I rip every possession we own out of it's place, clean it, and put it back into the correct location. Anything without a place gets tossed, freecycled, donated, or otherwise removed.

I started the process two weeks ago. Weeks 1 and 2 are for assessing the situation. Basically, during this time I pull everything out and clean behind, under, and around them.
Week 3 is for cleaning and sorting the items that are out. Is it broken? Do I use it? Does it need a button? I actually take the time to do these tasks during week 4. And Week 5 is spent putting it all back.

I still would love to close my eyes and see it magically done by an army of drones... but, that's about as likely as my husband realizing there's a trashcan less than a foot away from him while he's cooking.