Cardboard boxes

Hundreds of dollars of toys clutter our house. We have roughly 500 sq feet in our basement devoted to play with those toys. Yet, what do our children do? Play with cardboard boxes. In the last few days several boxes have come into the house and they apparently have established their residency. We ordered a backsplash for our cooktop. Large long box, seemingly useless for any other function than shipping a large, long object. Carter has made it his own and had a major meltdown when I attempted to include it in the trash for pickup today. The boxes for the curtain rods Tim put up for me this weekend are now robot arms. The boxes the kids' coats came in-robot bodies. So the quandry is do they prefer homemade fun toys they create or is it the fact that the basement is cold and they don't want to go down and play with the hundreds of toys? I would love to think we could purge the many toys. What a change that would be... no more picking up the mess. As a write Laurel has brought up hats, swords, and costumes to add to the cardboard box playset. Maybe a little of both is what we need. Either way it seems a purge is in order.