Piling in heaps and a clothing rail

‘I want to book in a cleaning company to give the whole house a going over. So I want to start consolidating what we've done. There's no point in having them if they can't get into most of the rooms. Let's start with the spare bedroom.’

The spare room used to have piles of clothes everywhere making it virtually impassable. Since Stella had bought the extra dress rail*, she could now have all her clothes in her bedroom.

Stella wanted to shift some of the furniture around so we moved a large cupboard, first removing the contents and a chair. This is the room where the Christmas decorations and wrapping are kept. We took the opportunity to organise it all.

Then we spent time moving boxes around, basic piling-in-heaps. Piling-in-heaps is the first step to organizing things. In order for a client to see how much and what they have, it helps to get one category of objects in one place. Stella is particularly fond of this part of the process; she calls it "like with like" and finds it has cut costs considerably. She can find things even before they really have a home so doesn't go out and buy more.

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*There are lots of clothing rails on the market. Many have lots of pieces and require complicated assembly. The results are often unreliable and not very sturdy. The best rails come in 4 pieces: 2 ends which click into the bottom piece and then a top bar that fits onto the side pieces. They can be put up and taken down in less than 5 minutes and are perfect for coats at big parties. Stella has found it invaluable to have a stable rail like this with wheels.

Shredding and coffee

Stella hired an industrial sized shredder.

She e-mailed me before I came, to say:

‘My sister will be here. I've invited her along to use the shredder for her paper and to check the inherited stuff to see if there's anything she wants. I also want to show her what we've done.’

It had been more than 2 years since her sister had been in the house.

I arrived at my usual 9:00. Stella told me that her sister would get there at 10:30 or so. In the end it was closer to 11:30.

Stella said, ‘I've bought 'real' coffee for us all in honor of the occasion. You've said that you don't drink instant.’

‘Wow! I e-mailed Beverly to tell her that your sister was coming and that this rates as a formal dinner party for 8. What do you want me to do?’

‘The more paper you can find that needs shredding, the better. I want to get my money's worth from this thing’

I planted myself in a corner on the floor and started sorting paper. The great thing was that Stella could have a final check of everything before she fed it into the shredder. While we waited for her sister, Stella told me what she'd done since our last visit:

‘I've moved all the clothes I still want to keep onto the new rack and I've used the old one for the ‘maybe’ items that I'm still thinking about.’

‘That's a change,’ I said, ‘When I first came, you couldn’t even touch your old clothes, then you could only touch them when I was here. Progress is definitely happening.’

It’s difficult when someone else is around to do paper, because everyone has confidential bits. We agreed that I would physically sit on some of the piles so they would be protected from casual glances.

Her sister arrived with bags of personal papers and started feeding them into the shredder. Coffee was drunk and then we all went to lunch together. In the flurry of hand washing before we left, I moved the papers I'd been sitting on into their file drawers upstairs.

After lunch, Stella and her sister went into the dining room and started going through inherited bits while I carried on sorting paper. We all talked about what Stella and I had done in the house, laughing and saying to her sister:

‘We should have taken some 'before' pictures so you could see the progress.’

I stayed an extra hour, making sure that Stella was confident about carrying on. Very quietly, and subtly she asked me for ‘a number’ I answered equally quietly, the cheque got written without trumpeting the sum.

Paper again!

Paper again! As I re-read and re-visit my Stella experiences I am struck by how common her clutter is to nearly all our clients, particularly paper. As far as Beverly and I can tell: NO ONE LIKES DOING PAPER.

'I want to re-visit the boxes of paper and do a first pass of some bags of paper', said Stella when I came into the house.

Getting paper out of slithery amorphous bags and vertically into 6-bottle-wine-boxes had become very much part of our process. In spite of there being paper Stella wasn't yet ready to face yet, she was much more confident and making lots of choices with the vast majority of it.

'I've found almost all my old work related papers that need shredding. I'd like to hire a big shredder to use over the long weekend. My sister has a pile of things she wants to destroy too.

'Guess what', I said, 'Beverly called me a few days ago to say she'd finished talking to a new client who'd chosen Cluttergone because of the Blog.

'By the way I said, you aren't the only one of my clients who has post they hate opening, even post that might have something good in it like a cheque. In fact, unopened post with cheques is especially yucky and seems to make people feel down and guilty.'

Somehow, when you talk about paper, clients imagine fancy file systems being beamed down into their home offices. Then like Mary Poppins or Merlin packing a case for a trip, all the papers jump into their respective files. Whereas, doing paper really means thinning down and thinning down until you are left with only things that you want to keep either for reference or because they still require some action.

In the first pass, doing paper means getting rid of the envelopes and junk bits, flattening the contents and making some very basic categories. The categories in this first stage are the same for everyone as they are for Stella: memories (personal letters), paid bills, bank records, work related papers, tax things, health, mortgage information. Getting rid of the obvious junk, the envelopes and the first throwaways usually will reduce the overall volume by at least a third and sometimes, more than half. Even more important, the remaining paper is now in neat squared off piles ready for the next sorting stage. In Stella's case, this is when we use the wine boxes.

'That's great!'

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.

We get lots done

7:05 am, the phone rings.

It was Stella.

‘I've a tummy upset. I don't know if it is catching because I don't know what's causing it. Just in case it is contagious, I wanted to give you the chance to cancel’

‘It's up to you. Would you like to give it a miss for today’

‘No, I don't want to lose the momentum and I've already worked out a plan for today. I think it might just be nerves.’

When I got there, Stella told me what she wanted to do, ‘We've been going through the paper and it is now slightly thinned out. I figured out some more criteria for things that can be re-cycled or shredded. So you can work on paper by yourself and I won't have to worry about infecting you. In the meantime, I'm going to work in the dining room sorting those things I inherited from my aunt. I don't want to keep it all and lots of things can go to other members of the family.’

I didn't get sick; we got lots done and were ready for the next visit.

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.