The "Clean House" show on the Style network is searching for the messiest home in the country. They haven't found mine yet, but it's just a matter of time. The more I watch, the more I think my house might qualify. I've started digging out in case the cast and crew show up at my door.

Here's what I've learned. You might have a messy house if:

• You're saving "skinny" clothes for when you lose 20, 30, and 50 pounds.
  
• You find a newspaper from Dec. 2, 2008, mixed in with your mail.
  
• You store a broken vacuum cleaner in the hall closet next to the one that works.
  
• You still have the used sparkplugs that your mechanic gave you after every tune-up since 1972.
  
• Your kid's Game Boy has corroded batteries.
  
• You save old toothbrushes because someday you might want to clean the grout around the bathroom tile.
  
• You have a roll of Valentine's Day wrapping paper on your kitchen table on the Fourth of July.
  
• You can't bear to throw out your collection of the last 72 issues of Us Weekly, even though most of the celebrity couples on the covers are now divorced.
  
• You find your neighbor's lost cat sleeping under the still-decorated Christmas tree wrapped in a sheet in the basement.
  
• You are storing a broken television in your garage.
  
• More than one broken television is stored in your garage.
  
• You saved empty gift boxes for future use, but you can't use them because someone put a broken television on top of them.
  
• You have 63 wedding invitations left over from your daughter's ceremony, and the happy couple now has a 9-year-old son.
  
• You have every Halloween costume your little monsters ever wore.
  
• You keep albums of photos of people you no longer recognize.
  
• You saved your children's baby toys for your grandchildren, who never got to play with them because you couldn't find them until the youngest graduated from sixth grade.
  
• You've saved all of your son's empty plastic CD cases.
  
• You thought they had CDs in them.
  
• You still have your college-graduate-daughter's middle-school basketball uniform.
  
• You still have the stakes for the tent you sold at a garage sale eight years ago.
  
• You have 11 cans of dried paint in case you ever need to touch up a wall.
  
• You have a button jar from which you've never used a single button.
  
• Your medicine cabinet has a bottle of Ipecac that you bought when your adult children were toddlers.
  
• You have the box and packing materials for a computer that crashed in 1998.
  
• You still have the computer.

If your house looks like mine, beware. After the "Clean House" crew leaves me, it will be coming your way!