Planning for the future

Straight to the dining room to carry on where Stella had left off, excavating the corner next to the piano sorting paper as we went. Piles for particular relations were confirmed and designated.

‘I want to take some of these things to my relations in Birmingham and spend the night’

‘That's a step.’ I said ‘Bigger than the day event you did three months ago. So that's part of the plan for doing this room?’

‘Yes, she replied, and some of the things will have to be shipped to the States. I've started thinking about having a family party for New Year and I'd need to have this room clear for that’
As we worked in the dining room, Stella would seize with glee anything that could be added to a pre-identified pile. She loves the creation of related piles ready to be thinned and examined and is always very excited that she doesn’t have to think about what to do but can just add it!
Bags for the charity shop have been growing in the front hall. Stella asked whether we could do a charity shop run on one of the visits. While she is absolutely ready to get rid of this stuff, parking and dragging the stuff into the shop is a bit daunting. She asked ‘Could we do it together.’

‘Sure, any time you want to do it’

We finished with all the plans very much in mind.

The first pass

‘What are we doing today?’ I asked after we'd said Hi and how are you doing.

‘I'm ready to make the first pass at the clothes, but before we start in, I want to show you what I've done since you were last here’

‘You are doing more and more between visits’

She led me into the sitting room, ‘I've moved the media table over a bit and I moved that large mirror into the hall. I've been thinking and planning to work on the clothes this time so I took down the drying frame in the kitchen where I've been keeping the clothes I wear every day.’

We had looked at all the clothes two and a half months ago when we’d picked outfits for the event she’d attended. I'd handled everything which had taken some of the ‘curse’ off her wardrobe.

Clothes carry lots of memory charges. People can see their lives stretched out in their closets. The highs and lows of a life have different wardrobes. Many women have clothes in several sizes, sometimes intentionally, the fat clothes and the thin clothes. The texture of clothes, the smell of old perfume is incredibly evocative and makes going through them an emotional thing for anyone. It was easy to see why it had taken the two and half months to come back to them and make the ‘first pass’.

Many of Stella's clothes were in the spare room. The door was open but there were clothes hung on hangers resting on the door frame. Trying to enter the room was very difficult; at least one or more hangers would fall.

‘You know I love doing clothes,’ I said. I organised it all into types: tops, trousers, skirts, dresses etc and then into colours so Stella could see how many of each thing she had and how many the same colour and shape.

The only criteria for a first pass is: Do you like it? The rejected pieces went into a bag for charity or if they were really worn-out, Stella threw them away.

This can be a big thing for many people. Worn out clothes are often the best beloved, the ones with the best memories. Throwing them away is often more difficult than giving away disliked or unworn clothing.

We made it all the way through and started a small collection of ‘memory’ clothes, things that will never be worn again but have particularly good stories attached to them. We also found some great vintage pieces for her nieces.

‘Eventually, I want to reduce my total wardrobe by a third, but I think it's going to take several of what you call passes.’

‘That's ambitious I said ‘You know, it can be helpful to keep a charity bag on the go all the time so if you try something on and you don't like it, you can put it straight in the bag.’

As we finished off, Stella said ‘This was the first time I haven't really dreaded your visit. It's not that I don't like you, but the decisions and the process is very difficult’

For those reading this, Stella and I have been meeting for four months. In spite of the difficulty, she has kept going, basically, she says, because it is easier to do that than to work out whether or not she ‘feels like it’!

I want to do the floral lumps!

Stella was much more chipper this time and was ready to talk about what happened between the two previous visits.

‘I was back to staying in bed, unable to do anything’

As I write this I think it must be very hard for Stella to do things in the bedroom. There is clutter to clear, but the clutter is often the comfort clutter of Stella's depression. Because, going back to bed in the down periods is a time when she needs to re-visit the comfort bits, to go in and try to sort stuff must trigger all kinds of conflicts besides reminding her of the bad times.

When I’d left at the last time, Stella had said: ‘I think we’ve found all the caches of paper’. On my way home I started thinking about two ‘lumps’ in her bedroom covered by floral curtain fabric and wondered what was underneath.

In answer to the question: ‘What do you want to do this week?’.

Stella said, ‘I want to do the floral lumps in my bedroom’. We laughed about both having thought about papers hiding there.

Once again I was impressed at Stella’s courage in going back into the bedroom that had produced a hiccup.

‘Since you were last here, I've started putting my laundry away in the drawers we've cleared.’

We passed the sitting room on our way to the bedroom and she showed me how she had built on the new furniture layout. She was pleased with how her decisions had worked. The stationary supplies that we'd found on another visit were now stored in the bottom of the computer table. She’d made some other titivations and refinements and was already making plans as to what she wants to do next in that room.

‘I want to move the TV table over. It will be a fiddle because I'll have to take it apart, but I can do that by myself.’

The choices and alterations Stella made when I wasn't there meant that the room was more than ever both hers and ’in use’.

We did find papers under the floral fabric which we carried down to the front room to join the ones that hadn’t yet had the initial thinning out. This freed up another corner in the bedroom.

To finish off we did a bit of basic paper sorting and, significantly, identified another class of paper that I could just throw out without having to ask Stella each time.

Good session, because Stella’s energy was back up we could do 4 hours.

Spinning furniture

The night before this session, Stella e-mailed:

‘The work we did in my bedroom last session has stirred up a lot of things for me and I haven't been sleeping. Rather than do any sorting or chucking out, I just want to move some of the furniture around.’

‘Right, furniture moving’, I said as I came through the front door.

‘What do you have in mind?’, I continued.

‘The sitting room layout is bothering me. I'm spending a lot of time in here since we did the basics. I want to move the bookcase over and put that chair where the sofa is. Then I want to bring the computer table down from my bedroom’

‘Okay, so the furniture is going into a blender spinning anti-clockwise with things moving around making space for the computer table?’

‘Yeah, that's it, with you and me doing the spinning.’

Once we had the space for the computer table cleared, we manoeuvred it out of her bedroom, down the stairs and into the sitting room. Although I didn't say it at the time, I was surprised that Stella wanted to go straight back into the bedroom. I was struck by the head-down courage. It was working there in the last visit which had been difficult for her. (Stella later said she had been most impressed when I said, of the computer unit, 'We'll throw it over the bannisters'. This worked!)

‘I wanted to do furniture moving because nothing we've done is irrevocable. If I don't like it and it isn't right we can always move it all back.’

‘That's a good way of thinking about it, I can use that with other declutter clients. Since you're expecting lots more visits, we don't need to push. It doesn't really matter what we do. We can always spend a session doing something small like sorting buttons’.

Back up in the bedroom, we then shuffled a small chest of drawers that had been blocking a doorway into the space the computer table had occupied. The result was astonishing. The whole room opened up and started to feel more like a bedroom. We opened the curtains.

‘I'm still looking for a window cleaner,’ Stella told me.

We did a small amount of paper before stopping for the day. Short session, only 3 hours

Old friends

I arrived and we sat down for our usual little chat before starting.

"I'm tired, I think I've been pushing myself a bit too hard"

"Do you want to make this a 'short' day?" I asked.

"Maybe, let's see how it goes. I want to go back to my bedroom. We haven't been there since the first time you came"

We started by moving the bags we'd packed for charity down to the front hall.

"I've organised some boxes so we could pack up more videos. I think I can pack the videos up but I probably won't be able to get rid of them completely for a while yet. We may finish the house before I'll be ready to let them go."

This was our second go at packing up old video tapes. We'd done the oldest ones in the fourth visit. There were a few special ones that she was trying to find which was difficult because all the boxes look the same because they are the films and programs she had recorded herself. These special ones were the 'lifesavers' when she was ill, the ones to watch late at night when sleep won't come. Everyone knows about 'comfort eating'. These videos fulfilled the same function for Stella. These 'old friends' like bald teddy bears are not things that she wants to throw away, just because they are an out-dated technology.

Starting next to the door, we worked our way around the room clearing and organising surfaces armed with a duster. Books were put away, bric-brac was cleaned and re-displayed. More bags of paper were carried down to the ground floor for the preliminary sort.

"Getting rid of the envelopes and the junk mail is easy and I'm much more comfortable doing it. It's amazing how much goes without needing a lot of thought or making decisions "
Papers that make it through the first sorting are containerised into boxes. Loose paper looks confusing . A neat box of paper is much more approachable.

Stella had a big smile as we both admired the clear space around her bed and in the middle of the floor.

Permission to publish the blog

I had seen Stella six times and sharing my visit diary with Beverly. We had started talking about the possibility of a blog after the third visit. Before and after photos are very popular, but nowhere had we'd seen describes how to get from Before to After. Doing a blog would be our chance to do that.

We did not want to unsettle Stella or to make her feel that her confidentiality was under threat. Asking her was something that we thought about very carefully.

I had decided that if Stella’s special event in the previous week had gone well that I would ask her how she would feel about a blog over lunch, on my seventh visit:

"Beverly and I have learnt a great deal from working with you. What has been particularly interesting is how insightful you are about the process and how you see it. We would like to put up a blog on line so that other people can understand better how it all works and how much control they would have. Of course, we would not give away any personal details and you would have total editorial control. If there is anything you do not want included, out it goes!"

She listened carefully and said she would like to see a sample. That turned out to be harder than either Beverly or I had thought. There were several drafts and many weeks passed before we had something we were happy to show Stella.

She then spent a while thinking about it. To her it was important to have control over what was written, to be sure of anonymity and that the blog would be running several months after the event. At first she was worried about the possibility that knowing the blog was to be written would effect what she discussed with me.

Stella is a precise reader and has picked us up on errors and inconsistencies. She is keen to maintain the momentum for decluttering and has also liked being able to reach out to other people in her position.

Clearing the stairs

Stella let me in and we sat down to discuss how her special event had gone.

She said:

"It was a bit much for me and I am still very tired, but I did it. I did leave a bit early, but I did manage to speak to everyone I'd planned to"

I said:

"Sounds like a success to me. What do you want to do today?"

"I want to do the stairs. My life is changing. It used to be that I would come down the stairs once a day. Now I find myself going up and down a lot and I'm trying to move things around. The loose stuff on the stairs is getting in the way and it is really irritating to look at. Having the front hall done has been good. This feels like the next step to opening the house up. I like the whole 'clustering thing'; putting like things together. Gradually, the clusters are finding homes.

"Among other things, we found two small mixed bags. Stella said:"Put those in the living room they can be our 'after lunch job'."

We usually work for 3 hours and then have lunch. The 'after lunch jobs' take about an hour. After we had cleared the loose bits, I suggested stacking some of the paper filled boxes more tidily.

"Hey, here's some magazines that we missed the first time around." We both laughed. In any big job, there are always things missed the first time around. It's also kind of relaxing to do those things for which the strategy has been set.

Stella and I started removing the magazines and empty envelopes; not serious sorting, just pitching the obvious junk. Before long we had two big bags of recycling, a black bin liner and all the remaining paper contained in boxes and neatly stacked. I did some hoovering which is our way of signally space has been reclaimed rather than being a thorough clean.

We were both excited by the stairwell. There were still piles of books, but as I said to Stella;

"I've seen interior design magazines with books piles on the treads in a very artful way"

"Oh, good" she replied, "I don't want to leave them there forever, but in the meantime, it looks okay. If someone comes to the door, I can open it knowing that they will see a normal hall and normal stairs"

"Oh, yes!"

"It's going to look even better when I get those pictures hung in the stairwell and that will mean that they won't be cluttering up the floor.

"As we left for lunch, Stella commented,

"My sister came by on Sunday to pick me up for a family do. Just having the hall done meant I could invite her in to use the toilet, if she wanted to for the first time in two years. Now she could actually go up the stairs"

When we got back from lunch, I looked around for the little bags we would set aside in the sitting room.

“I did them by myself, while you were finishing the tidying up," said Stella." And I've called a window washer".