In about a week we will bring home two new kittens. My husband and I are thrilled, not just because our family will double in size and we will again be cat-governed, but because in order to make the place fit for new kittens, we’ve had to do some renovating.

Our previous cats were aged. In their declining months they tainted large areas of the living room and dining room hardwood floors with “pet spills.” The basement, too. Pretty much all of it.

So, in order to encourage the new kitties to exercise their newfound tidiness skills—they’re only 12 weeks old—we have sanded and refinished the living room and dining room floors, and done an unbelievable number of processes to the raw concrete basement floor.

The results are awesome. So awesome that I now want to throw out everything that was cluttering these spaces and leave them empty, pristine, glowing, beautiful.

Here’s the living room, shown here post-refinish but also with furniture added back in.

Here’s stuff removed from the living room, crammed onto the front porch while I try to figure out who I can give all that crap to so it doesn’t have to re-enter the nice new rooms.

And now here’s the new basement. Never mind the walls. The walls are immaterial. Look instead at the gray-painted floors, vast areas of tidy emptiness.

And here are the things we moved off the basement floor in order to paint it. Realistically speaking it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to dispose of any of this stuff.

Moreover, it will probably evolve that these efforts to kittenproof the house have been mis-focused. They will turn out to be arrant curtain-climbers. Or they will practice standing high jumps onto bureaux adorned with fragile ornaments. Or something.

But, by gum, we’ll have nice floors. And less clutter.

Since you’ve at least pretended to pay attention to my home improvements, you deserve some kitten pictures. Here they are. We haven’t picked names for them yet. The lighter-colored kitten is currently known by her foster-mother as “TT” or “Tan Tabby,” and, I am assured by her foster-mother, a reet hellion. The darker yellow kitten is “Flo,” misgendered unless we decide to call him “Florenz Ziegfeld.”