On the kitchen island of Michelle Parr’s house there were to be found: 100 jam jars; a crate of high school exercise books; motley pans; a globe; six bottles of shampoo and a stack of Twinkle magazines from 1980.
Parr, 49, was unable to walk into her spare room because of the floor-to-ceiling boxes. “So I just shut the door on it,” says the former BBC script editor, who now runs a craft business from her home in Bramhall, near Manchester. “Another room was full of my craft stuff, cardboard, glitter and scissors, spilling onto the floor. It was like someone had vomited a lifetime of stuff.”
A fan of amateur dramatics, Parr had a self-proclaimed shoe-fetish and was the owner of nine bursting wardrobes. “But my Dorothy costume and ‘dead bride’ outfit were stuffed in with all my other clothes, most of which were black so I couldn’t tell them apart,” she says. Parr couldn’t move her belongings into the garage, because of the four sofas crammed in there.
“There’s quite a lot of mess, Mummy,” said her seven-year-old son, Nathaniel, at the time.
Parr – who had downsized with Nathaniel into a four-bedroom semi after her divorce in 2016 – always made sure they had clear bedrooms and a place to eat. But as Parr freely admits, otherwise, the place was chaos.
“Chaos” – or “can’t have anyone over” syndrome – is one clue you have a problem, according to the professional declutterers. And right now, they are having a moment, as evidenced by the popularity of the BBC1 prime-time show, Sort Your Life Out. A recent episode attracted 3.9 million viewers: no small feat in the age of streaming.
Sort Your Life Out, presented by the former X-factor contestant Stacey Solomon, is a makeover show in the Changing Rooms mould. A swat team takes over a family’s cluttered home and puts it in order; the climax involves the candidates facing every single possession being removed from their home and spread over a warehouse floor. Then, the experts help them sort through what they want to keep, and what to dispose of.
The show is good-natured, practical and surprisingly moving, with lines such as: “Do we really need 124 towels or 106 spanners?”
Dilly Carter is a professional organiser, and one of the hosts of Sort Your Life Out.
“The show succeeds because it’s so relatable,” she says. “No matter what size house you have, or who you live with, you can relate to the family who have 45 mobile phone chargers, or who have recently lost a parent or a spouse. And if it’s not you, it could be your sister, brother or parent.” The warehouse scene in particular is universal, she says: “Everyone watching thinks: imagine if that was my house!”
The show resonates, she adds, because we all have “stuff”, and we have an emotional attachment to it. And like the families on the show, we can’t bear to throw anything away.
“The first thing to emphasise is that it’s not about your stuff, it’s about you,” says Juliet Landau-Pope, a social-sciences-academic-turned-professional-organiser, and the author of What’s Your Excuse For Not Clearing Your Clutter? “Most of what we buy or collect is not because of our physical needs, but because of our emotional ones. Our possessions represent a tangled mix of anxieties, aspirations, fears and fantasies. They link us through memory to the past and also with hope for the future.”
It is perhaps helpful to draw a distinction between living among clutter, and being “a hoarder” - a term which people with busy homes might use light-heartedly to describe themselves. Hoarding disorder is now recognised as a complex mental health condition.
“People exist along a continuum of tidiness,” says Sharon Morein, an associate professor and the head of the Possessions and Hoarding Collective at Anglia Ruskin University. “But living in clutter can become hoarding disorder when it’s chronic, distressing and maladaptive – for example, you can’t sleep in your bed, or use your bathroom, because of all the possessions you have.”
For most of us, thankfully, household clutter is more an annoyance, a manageable accumulation of years of acquisition. “We live in a society where we are constantly encouraged to buy stuff,” says Landau-Pope. “And so we accumulate: through shopping, the presents we receive, souvenirs from holidays. It starts from childhood: we are taught to play shopping games, but not how to let things go. People don’t learn ‘exit strategies’, we aren’t instructed what to do with the old stuff.”
Carter points to an instant and increasing buying culture. “Everyone wants everything, now,” she says. “From my sunbed here in Marbella, I can buy something from Amazon on my phone. And despite the financial crisis, we show no signs of slowing down. We just buy cheaper things.”
It’s true, however, that some people amass more than others, and at different stages.
“Having surplus stuff is often associated with life-changes such as a bereavement, a divorce, or the children leaving home,” says Landau-Pope. “Older people unsurprisingly have more clutter. Immigrant families bring things with them so they have a stronger sense of connection to their ancestors: a sari, or a set of Shabbat candles.”
Comfortable clutter has been part of Ben Afia’s life since childhood. “My grandfather was born in Turkey,” says the 52-year-old Nottingham-based branding consultant. “He ran a fabric and furniture store and my earliest memories are of climbing around the items in his shop.” But then, when Afia was in his second year of university – “appropriately studying archaeology, the clutter from previous generations” – his mother died. At the age of 21, Afia was left with the contents of his family home.
“My parents had already split up, so I inherited all of it, including their wedding cutlery from the late 60s,” he says. “When I drove to Nottingham to start my first job, I had to hire a Luton van to carry 30 boxes with me. I started collecting more stuff to give me a sense of security, like a child constructing his own room.”
He continued to accumulate CDs and clothes. “I was massively into the fantasy game Warhammer, and still have hundreds of little figurines,” he says. “Like my father, who has a gadget display in his hallway, I acquired a huge collection of vintage technology. Even now, I have a pile waiting to go on eBay containing a 2013 MacBook Air, an early iPod and five cameras.”
Afia later married and the couple had two children, now aged 18 and 21. Not everyone was happy with the amount of stuff. “My wife, Jane, grew up in a house without books and she increasingly wanted to get rid of them,” he says. “But I have hundreds of books: on philosophy and self-help, finance and historical fiction, many of them inherited from my mother. Even though I was increasingly reading things on Kindle, I loved and still love having the books around me. Just seeing them reminds me of the ideas behind them.”
Yet, as the experts point out, clutterers are often forced into action by those who have to share the space with them. About 10 years ago, Afia eventually realised he’d have to rationalise his belongings.
“We’ve moved several times, and on each move, we get rid of more clutter,” he says. “Over Christmas, Jane and I went through everything: the children’s soft toys, and their school work. Some of it went to the tip, some on eBay – some is still awaiting a home.
“It was very difficult,” he says. “’What do we keep, what do we throw away?” He insisted on keeping a wooden helter-skelter bought for his children by his grandmother. “Even though my children never played with it, I decided to keep it for my own nostalgia: it was emblematic of my grandma’s Edwardian childhood.”
And that’s the eternal question: what do we hang on to, and what can we bear to part with? “I always encourage people to think about the ‘why’,” says Carter. “Think about how your possessions affect you and your relationships. If you can’t find food in your cupboard because of all the out-of-date items, if your kids are emptying the whole toy box to find that one doll and if you can’t find your bills in a pile of paper, it’s time to take action.”
Landau-Pope encourages her clients to recognise and address their fears. “Immigrants might have anxiety around scarcity, for example,” she says. “That fear of never having enough. The trick is to switch to an ‘abundancy mindset’. I do have enough. And if I need stickers for my children, I can go out and buy them.”
Ultimately, Landau-Pope continues, the question is: what do I need in my life right now? “Everything comes into our lives for a reason, whether it’s bought, given, or inherited,” she says. “But it doesn’t need to stay right now. You can cherish the memories associated with the object, but you don’t have to keep it. It can be very liberating to have autonomy over your surroundings.”
In 2018, two years after moving into her new home, Parr was so upset by the clutter she was thinking of selling the house. “I constantly told myself that as long as the beds were tidy it was OK,” she says. “But the truth was, my house was so messy I was unable to relax. I was endlessly jumping around and creating more chaos by half-emptying boxes then giving up. It got to the point where I couldn’t bear to be at home. I took any excuse not to be there: going to choir practice or visiting friends.”
Eventually, Parr was introduced to Siân Pelleschi, the president of the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers at a local networking event. “Siân came over and calmly and discreetly went over and sorted my whole life, from the age of seven until now,” says Parr.
They started with the bedroom wardrobe. “Siân emptied everything onto my bed,” Parr recalls. “She queried why I had 10 pairs of wedge boots and five identical dresses. Then she asked me honestly whether I was ever going to wear them again. With crockery it was similar: Siân made me realise it was unrealistic to expect I would regularly be throwing dinner parties for 16 people and that I probably didn’t need 40 champagne flutes.”
Some decisions were emotionally upsetting. “Even though I’d been divorced for three years at that point, I couldn’t face getting rid of the guest book from my wedding day,” says Parr. “So Siân made me boxes labelled ‘sentimental’ for the things I didn’t use, but couldn’t bear to throw away. I put them in the attic. She also told me I didn’t need to keep every single painting my son had ever made, so I took photographs of his drawings and put them in a photo album.”
Parr sold a bed, a dining room table and a wardrobe on Facebook Marketplace. She gave away some of the other wardrobes, anything that had no value was thrown away; “bin bags and bin bags of stuff”. The curtains from her old home, languishing in boxes, were recycled and also made into cushions and lampshades.
For Parr, a lifetime of cluttered living is a hard habit to break. Four years on, she’s still in contact with Pelleschi, who makes regular “top-up” visits. She sees her life as transformed, however. “Nathaniel, who’s now 12, has a proper place to play and a proper place to sleep,” she says. “I also have a lot more headspace. I’m no longer daunted by the mess, and I can tackle it. There are no more “drawers of doom”. I’m no longer restless. I am comfortable in my home, and far more happy in my own head.”
Five ways to tackle your clutter
By Sharon Morein, the head of the Possessions and Hoarding Collective at Anglia Ruskin University
Don’t be overwhelmed: little and often is the key
Whether you declutter for five minutes a day, or once a week, set a goal you feel comfortable with. If it helps, set a timer. Plus, there’s no need to do a whole room in a weekend. Just pick one shelf in your cupboard, and start there.
Arrange things in categories, and get rid of duplicates
Putting things in order means you will find them more easily. Make sure that everything has its own space. Be honest with yourself: do you really need 50 pairs of shoes?
Set up a ‘donation station’
For example, a bag or a box near the front door, destined for the charity shop, eBay or the tip.
Train yourself into tidiness
We teach our children good habits, for example, to brush their teeth at a certain time. Why not do the same as regards being tidy? Adults can train themselves as well. It’s never too late.
Don’t forget to celebrate
If you’ve tidied for 15 minutes, say, you tell yourself you deserve that cup of tea. Taking before and after pictures is a great way to remind yourself of your achievement.
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