Cleaning Out

My husband is neat.  Generally.  Topically.  But, he is also a hoarder.  Not of stuff from the kids...he has never once tried to figure out what to do with so many mementos and such.  No, only of his stuff and of anything that he deems that I am being wasteful of.  Socks.  If they have a hole, we are to keep them.  Repair them.  Apparently I am to do these repairs, seeing as nobody else ever has.  I used to.  I'd rather buy the kids a new pack every few months that aren't thin and gray.  So began the very large basket of mismatched, holey, discolored, misshapen,tiny, not even ours, socks.  Seriously, I bought a new laundry basket to use for laundry.  This sock basket is like a household tradition.  Painfully for me.  Like an illustration he keeps on hand to show my slovenly ways.  Once when he was out of town, I went through and took out all of the socks that were needing to be gotten rid of.  I sacked them up.  Intended to have them to the trash truck before he returned.  Somehow they were still in the bin.  The big outside bin.  He retrieved them.  Put them in storage in our barn loft.  I mean, seriously...like the mice need anymore stuff.  You go up there and it's unbelievable.  He has piles of newspapers.  Keep forever.  That has to be a fire hazard.  All kinds of stuff that we don't need or use.  His old love letters.  No.  Not from me.  I've never cared.  For real.  It's a history of his life.  That's important.  He had a life before me.  One his mother wishes he would have embraced.
The point is that we are not allowed to clean out for reasons of it somehow being wasteful.  I like keeping many things.  Have pictures drawn on napkins by two year olds.  I don't have a high standard of throwing out everything.  But, I don't think it's wasteful to throw away that which I don't need.  I don't think so.  Although I question myself about everything these days. 
Hence, my problem around my house.  I need days to peruse and choose.  To get things cleaned out.  Put together.  Orderly but comfortable.  I need to do that.  To figure it out.  I look around.  Know what I want to do.  Now I need to find the ability to do it.  Constantly watched.  Evaluated.  When I do something he makes the noises of "oh, now this is how it should be..."  and that makes me not want to do it anymore.  I'm not incredibly oppositional.  I just can't always feel like it's some performance scale. 
Need to clean out.  In many different ways.  Thoughts.  Feelings,  Emotions.  Rooms.  Yard.  Porch.  Everything.  Beginning without anything changing seems hard.