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.