6. Playing with clothes

Only a week had gone by since our last meeting instead of our usual two-week interval. Stella was going to an event on what would have been our regular meeting time. She wanted me to come for an extra visit both to keep momentum going and to help her figure out what to wear to the event.

When I got to Stella's, there was a bit of a holiday atmosphere, we were playing hooky! We weren't doing any work, just playing with clothes.

Stella opened the door saying: ‘You know how I told you that I can't really do anything when you aren't here? Well, I'm really taken with the whole like with like bit, so I do just shift things around so like things are together’

I said: ‘That's great! Just that bit of organising makes the next stages so much easier. AND, I see the living room curtains are still open!’

Clothes as a clutter issue are a difficult thing for Stella. All her professional life is stretched out in closets with bits of her illness dotted in. Until this week, we hadn't touched clothes at all. Stella wasn't ready to 'clear clothes'. But that wasn't what we were planning: We were looking for something to wear. Stella asked me to put on my designer hat.

‘Okay," I said, "Tell me about this event and how you want to present yourself’

Stella gave me all the details and I started going through her closets while she watched. She couldn't touch the clothes herself, but she could watch me doing it.

We found an outfit with which she was happy; made up of things she had forgotten she had in sizes that she thought would be too small. We also found some other clothes that pleased her and could be worn on other occasions.

Oh, and there was a great side-effect: We actually had gone through the whole of her wardrobe, not shifting or pitching but certainly agreeing on some candidates for the toss. The dark spell was broken. The clothes are no longer a no-go area.

We had some extra time, so we did a couple of bags of paper. Stella has been gradually shifting bags of paper down to the ground floor to be sorted.

She described coming back after getting the morning paper on a morning: ‘I come in, pick up the post, put it down in the living room, make a cup of tea. Then I sit down and open the post. '

Real life, quiet pleasures.

12. 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’!

17. 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 organising 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.

21.Tackling the kitchen

By now we had touched on most of the major rooms but one. On my arrival for the 20th visit, Stella greeted me:

‘I'd like to have a go at the kitchen cupboards and see if we make space for some of the things I've inherited, particularly the glasses’

The inherited things she was talking about were currently living on the dining room table. This was our first go at the kitchen which was mostly a home for drying and dried clothes. It wasn't horribly untidy; it was just unused and frozen in time with dust.

We started with the cupboard under the sink and found lots of spare rags and j-cloths.

‘I won't have to buy any for years, will I.’ laughed Stella

‘This cupboard is quite big,’ I said, ‘It would take one of those freestanding shelves which would make it much easier to keep things in order’

‘I thought that,’ replied Stella, ‘But, I've been listening to your warnings about not buying storage 'solutions' until we know what we actually need.’

As we pulled out the cupboards and compared the contents with the things she had inherited, some things went into the rubbish pile and a few things for charity. There were quite a number of things that went on the kitchen table ‘To Be Considered’.

‘I like it that you don't push me to throw out anything immediately, even when I'm leaning in that direction. It makes the process less scary.’

By the end of the session, we had done about half of the cupboards.

‘I'd like to finish this first go at the kitchen. Can we make an extra appointment for next week?’ asked Stella.

‘Sure, I'm free on Wednesday and Friday. Which one would you like?’

‘Wednesday.’ See you then.