5. Opening the curtains

The night before, Stella called and left a message on my machine saying:

‘I don’t want to cancel, but I had a difficult meeting today and I’m feeling even more fragile than usual. I just wanted to call and warn you’.

I called back and left a message on her machine:

‘No problem, if you like we can work a shorter day, only three hours or so.’

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Stella showed me two large empty boxes, which were waiting for us in the front room where there were stacks of video tapes.Our first task was to move the last of the Christmas decorations from the dining room to the spare bedroom, leaving space for some treasured mementos to take their place. Next, we moved some linen and bedding which had been gathered onto the sitting room sofa. Some was put into it’s final home the airing cupboard and some into the spare bedroom from where, Stella thinks, it will at some point be tossed. In preparation, Stella had pulled up the coverlet on the spare room bed so there would be a place to put the pillows and duvets.

I’m usually early for my appointments and often spend 10 minutes reading in bus shelters, so I don’t arrive before the client is ready. This time, I ran into Stella who was running an errand as I came out of the tube station. We walked back to her place together.

Despite the phone call she was prepared and knew what she wanted us to do. But first she gave me an A.A. Milne poem “The Old Sailor” which she had printed out for me. It’s about a shipwrecked sailor who can’t decide what to do first as his situation gets worse and worse. Here’s the last verse:

‘And so in the end he did nothing at all,
But basked on the shingle wrapped up in a shawl.
And I think it was dreadful the way he behaved -
He did nothing but basking until he was saved!’

Stella said: ‘I think it was Cluttergone coming which stopped everything going round and round in my head.’ 

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‘Those clothes in the hallway don’t live there.’ said Stella, ‘I just wanted you to see that I did send them to the dry-cleaner as we discussed.‘Stella had moved boxes from the sitting room by herself. She had also set up her new TV and DVD player and was now enjoying the room.

While it sounds minor, in fact, as Stella said, she was taking on board the process that requires ‘preliminary/temporary sorting” and that putting like things together helps. Further, clearing the sofa meant that the sitting room now looks like a proper room with just a few boxes.

Finally, we did some preliminary paper sorting in the living room. This is the paper which in the first visit Stella had said ‘Ignore those piles, I know what’s in them’. On the second visit, she let me put several piles into boxes, leaving the boxes where the piles had been. Today we ended up with two bin liners of rubbish and three bags of recycling!

The crowning moment of the day came when Stella opened the curtains and said.

‘I could imagine having someone around for a drink, now!’

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.

10. 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

11. 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.

13. 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.

15. 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 diary.

'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!'

16. 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.

20. Completely clear

‘The cleaning visit really took it out of me. I haven't done much since then. Can we make this a short day? We can do more paper’

She took me into the sitting room where I had left some stacks of paper.

The coffee table was completely clear.

‘I finished them off myself.’ Stella smiled

Every time I passed the room during the session, I kept sneaking looks at it. When I told Stella what I was doing, we both laughed. It is hard to describe how important and startling it was.

‘I've also been opening some financial post by myself’

‘Great!’

Many of our clients ‘hide’ from their finances, not opening bank statements and the like for years at a time. Sometimes it starts because they are having financial difficulties, but more often it is because they just don't want to deal with it. Luckily, many use direct debits extensively, so the bills don't go unpaid and life can go on. It is a big moment for them to retake control!

I took one last look at the clear coffee table before I left.

25. Putting away in drawers

The front hall was completely clear when I arrived. All the collapsed boxes, kitchen rejects and the 'unwanted' that we'd piled up were gone.

'The car was fully packed when I set off for the tip. I could just see out of the rearview mirror. After all we did last visit, I couldn't think of a really chewy project for this visit, so I figured we could do the default one: Paper'

'Hey, we aren't always going to have highs like finding all that stuff to go to the tip. Okay so paper doesn't sound exciting. However when we finally finish the paper,that will be HUGELY exciting'

We got through 5 more boxes. Stella has some furniture with narrow little drawers in her bedroom that we have been using for filing. Putting away what was in the 5 boxes made the drawers too full.

'Can we weed out some of the older paper and maybe refine these drawers a bit?' Stella asked.

'Of course, it's your paper!'

Over coffee and cakes, Stella showed me the shelf she'd bought for under the sink. Because everything was already sorted, it didn't take very long to install it.

26. Missing paper

Stella opened the door looking very nervous and tired.

'Hi. How are you?'

'Not good,' said Stella,'I haven’t slept, it’s been a dreadful week. Monday, I went to the box that I thought was the one filled with the business stuff and it wasn’t. I panicked and rushed around looking but couldn’t find the right box and that made me even more worked up. So I stopped because I couldn’t look systematically I couldn’t even think. I needed to have someone with me. You were coming today, so I thought, I will wait for Chrystine."

'Okay," I said, 'Let’s start at the top of the house and look in all the boxes.'

So we did.

I found some old business related stuff which raised our hopes for a moment.

We’d worked our way to the front room and behind the door were some boxes that I’d labelled. It wasn't there. We methodically made our way around the room. We got to a bookcase with some boxes in front of it. Stella said 'These are my grandfather’s things 'But then she looked closer, into the bottom shelf of the bookcase itself.

'Oh my, oh, here it is!!'

'I am so glad that you actually found it yourself!' I said.

We retired to make coffee and eat pain au chocolate.

We didn’t actually do much else on the visit, we talked over coffee for 2 and a half hours, Stella reckoned that it was all part of decluttering her mind after it had gotten so full of yuck over the week.

'Usually, we talk a bit before we start, but you knew that I needed you to pitch straight in.' commented Stella 'And, usually, you ask me what I want to do, my sense of control and responsibility for deciding that was established at our first session. But this time I needed you to take the lead in how we were going to do it!'

'I’m interested that you didn’t phone or e-mail me,' I responded

Stella said:

'I didn’t think that you would know. I have always been responsible for that box. You hadn’t ever even gone through it. Why would you know where it was? If it was gone, it would be because I took the box to the tip or to a charity shop. It is important that I control panic and leave certain things for an appropriate time'

'But, we’ve been careful. Paper has either been shredded or put in re-cycle bags'

'Yes, I know,' said Stella," and if I had done something silly, I just wanted you to be here when I found out!'

The HUGE satisfaction for us both was that the process is working! We did a box of paper after lunch.

27. Much tidier now

When Stella made this booking, she was expecting friends to come for drinks before they all went out to dinner together. We were going to titivate the sitting room and consolidate some of the things we’d been working on.

‘My friends have had train problems so they can’t come today and I was up late last night seeing Obama through his celebrations. So I don’t really have a plan for this session’

‘Okay, shall we do some of those bits and pieces that have been bugging you? We could start with packing away the Christmas decorations.’

‘That’s good. Can we then go back to that cupboard under the stairs? It’s aired out now. I’ve bought some special stackable plastic boxes for things like light bulbs.’

It didn’t take very long because we’d already sorted under the stairs and disposed of the rubbish in an earlier visit.

‘The place is now so much tidier that I’ve started thinking about decorating. I’ve had these pictures framed and I bought cushions. I want to use the needlepoint cushion covers we found. Come see the dining room. Do you notice anything?’

‘You’ve removed the three vases of fake flowers you were using to screen the mess in the room.’

‘I’ve given several lots to the charity shop and the others I’ve just thrown away.
As soon as I have anything for charity, I rush out and take them immediately!’

Then we went back to our default activity: sorting paper and did a couple more boxes.

Stella said, ‘Please notice, I am actually sorting paper into piles, not just watching you or playing around the edges.’

As we worked, we talked a bit more about the last session when we had to find the box. If it had disappeared altogether, our process would have been thrown into doubt.

As we finished for the day, I said:

‘We’ve only got three more boxes of paper to do.’ Stella replied, ‘Our next default task will be the books.’

29. Finishing the paper

Stella opened the door.

‘I think we can finish the first pass through the paper today’

‘So that’s the plan?’

Way back when we started, there was paper all over the house. Some of it was un-opened post, most of it was in tipping piles. The first step had been just to tidy the piles, square up the corners but to leave them where they were so that if Stella knew something to be in one pile or another she could still find it. 

The next step was to put the piles into individual boxes, leaving the boxes where the piles had been. Then, eventually we moved the boxes onto the landing. With all the unsorted paper in one place, it was easier to go through it bit by bit. We filed the paper to be kept in some small drawers. The next stage would be editing the contents of those drawers. Whenever there was some leftover time in a session, we’d do paper. The stack of boxes had been getting smaller and smaller.

Final two boxes of landing paper done!

‘I knew we’d finish the boxes, so I bought some cakes for our coffee break to celebrate.’

There was even time to carry on with the books, refining the piles and doing more alphabetizing. We went an extra half hour, Stella’s stamina is increasing.