Crap Behind the Couch

With all 3 kids and Mike out of the house for the day (finally), I decided since I was up at 6:30 a.m., I was going to clean my family room and then declare it off limits to everyone except me.

Our family room is attached to our kitchen. Picture this. When you walk into our front door, you walk all the way straight back to the back door. When you get about 5 feet from the back door and stop, to the right is the kitchen and the family room is to the left. They are attached with a little walkway between them from the front to back doors. This is pertinent because of the proximity of our kitchen (which I hate by the way :( to the family room is part of the problem.

When we got this house, I could hear my mom's voice inside my head telling me to take care of this house for God sake and not let those girls trash this one too. I made a declaration that no one is allowed to eat in the family room unless they make more than $50,000 a year and contribute to the mortgage. I was dead serious about this. In order to avoid dragging this post out too long, that lasted probably a good 3 months and eventually everyone assumed that rule was optional. When I see anyone eating in there, I tell them to get out and they look at me and keep eating. Then I get pissed, but that doesn't matter...they don't care.
Every 2 months I try to empty out the whole family room when I am home alone and start from scratch like I did the day they gave us the keys to our new home. Well, each time this happens, I find bizarre, random crap behind my couches. This should NOT happen because no one is supposed to be even breathing in that room as far as I am concerned.

Today's finds: several chewed up straws, bobby pins, sunflower seed shells, dog hair, shirt tags cut off, a live spider!!, a remote for the ceiling fan, crumbs, a bounce sheet, and other miscellaneous crap of the sort. The room is completely empty, couch pieces in the next room, and I have to pick up all this crap that they stuff behind my couches. By now my BP is probably at an all time high. Then I go around with the vacuum hose and suck up all the edges of the room and cushions, etc., vacuum the room, and then return all the pieces back to where they belong. I windex everything and then put up the rope from wall to wall with the sign that says, "Stay the Hell Out". Yes, this is not very ladylike or teacherlike, but I have had it. Last time I did this in June, I tied the rope to the tall lamp in the corner by the back door and taped the other end to the wall. Alexa walked into the rope by accident and I watched my lamp tip over and shatter into a million glass pieces. Won't be doing that again. No lamp anymore.

So, for now, as I type, my family room is immaculate. No one has gone in there except the 2 dogs, which I suspect are part of the problem, but they can't read English...signs mean nothing to them. I'll enjoy it until the next deep cleaning in about October where I will have another list of weird stuff I found behind my couches.