Dealing with Clutter: Sense of Security

For the most part of my life I have lived with clutter. I remember growing up and having one room of the house to be the "cachibache" room. In there we threw everything we didn't use often. And when I say threw, I mean literally threw. That room was a mess. Random stuff piled over everything. Now that I think about it, it was basically a storage room but with no organization what so ever. We moved fairly often and this messy room of stuff would get packed over and over and over, unused, unchecked. Only on the rare occasion when we would have a flood would we weed through the stuff, and mourn the once forgotten stuff we had not seen since our last move.
And here I am now as an adult finding myself with the same problem, except here in NYC, we don't have the luxury of an extra room unless we rent a storage space. So all my "cachibaches" are spread around all over the house creating a chaotic mess. I always blamed it on being tired to clean, on not having enough space, or a good shredder (you know, identity theft and all). The girls are too little, they need my attention, I can't possibly spend the day cleaning. But these are all excuses, like the one I have used the most often "we are going to move soon anyway so why bother". But soon has been five years and we are still at the same house, and this takes me to another thing, sense of security. What I have come to learn is that throughout my life I've moved so much and my situation has been so random that I lost the sense of security that I should have had since I was a child and with this I developed and attitude of indifference. I never considered anything to have the ability to be mine long term, so I never found the need to care and keep anything in nice condition, because to me there was no point in making an effort for temporary things. But even life is temporary, why not make it the best, right? So now as I find myself weeding through clutter, getting rid of stuff, one room at a time. I propose to make my soroundings nice, and with this my family gets happy in return too.