Husbandly Crimes and Misdemeanors

I declined to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey and invited no one to celebrate this year. "The Holiday" is not integral to our existence, having not grown up in the U.S. and I've done my share of gatherings for solitary neighbors and foreign flotsam and jetsam over the decades.
This year, self preservation instincts kicked in. I'm working 6 days a week and nurturing my husband along the path to recovery with much attention and daily home cooked repasts. We're very lucky that our Lovely Daughter has moved back home and that she works from home so husband is not alone very often. He's no longer at deaths door, from the multiple life threatening issues that filled our days, nights and thoughts from late May until a few weeks ago.
Now the rub...
Since his retirement (otherwise known as the cessation of participation in our joint business, with nary a warning or a plan) I have been advocating for some management and triage of the hordes of papers that fill one bedroom. Mostly in file cabinets, classified in obscure and long forgotten ways, it was an impossible task for him to locate his passport (I have it now) but photos and prices of antique furniture in a French store which closed ten years ago, after the demise of the owner are floating atop the pile on the desk. That eight foot wide obligation was the beginning of good intentions to diminish the hoard. Unfortunately, he cannot make a decision to dump a whole, ancient and obviously useless file. Every page must be viewed and most set aside as possibly useful in the future. The pile had been left untouched for over a year, as it's dauntingly immense obligation stopped him at the door.
I asked for a couple of hours to be spent together on Thanksgiving afternoon. One of few days of personal time for me. I asked nicely. I was willing to do the work. He just had to sit there and review final decisions.
We found some validly interesting and important stuff; Certificate of U.S. Citizenship: Old Press Articles and photos of his artwork and our Stone Carving accomplishments. I ditched the dead antique dealer file, as well as the incorporation papers of a small import export business we had for a year or two in the early nineties. I filled the office waste basket and cleared the desk top. I removed the "Door over file cabinets" desk top to hinder future spread and was so very thrilled with our accomplishment. Can anyone foresee my glaring mistake?
When I came home at lunchtime yesterday, "Someone" was as mad as a wet hen, demanding to know why I'd discarded so much of his precious archive and ordering me to return his desk-top. Never mind that there's another desk in that room and yet another in his Art Studio, which is what normal folks would use as a living room.
If only I had emptied that waste basket! He'd brought it into the kitchen and taken over that table.
Words were exchanged, my optimism and happiness left the building. I seriously considered the option of setting a fire in our house but decided the insurance would not cover that.