Top Tips for De-cluttering

So where do you start with the whole decluttering process?  Well, maybe you should consider these top ten signs that the time has come:

1. You lose something.  I’m not just talking misplaced, it-will-turn-up-one-day kind of lost, I’m talking something precious or important that makes you feel physically sick at the thought you have permanently lost it.  This has happened to me twice now and it sure wastes a lot of energy.
2. You injure yourself.  There is so much physical clutter around that you bump into it, trip over it, get buried under it. A few years ago, Adrian broke a toe, ’nuff said.
3. You break something precious.  You have nowhere to put anything, so you resort to balancing acts which endanger both you and your precious objects.  Before you know it, there’s a paperwork mountain landslide and you lunge to catch it, tripping over something in the process and SMASH, the china is gone.
4. You inherit some nice stuff  and you have nowhere to display it.
5. You and your partner are constantly arguing about the state of the place, leading to a Mexican stand off where you both refuse to clean up the other person’s mess.  There’s ways to deal with this and get your partner involved, honest.
6. You often get ill with tummy upsets, colds or your hayfever/asthma is worse than ever.  Have you ever watched “How Clean is your House”?  The range of bacteria that can breed in your cluttered spaces is scary!
7. You have more clothing outside the wardrobe than inside.
8. You have a dining table, but can’t remember the last time you dined at it.
9. Your mum comes to visit in her own caravan because your spare room is full of clutter.  (OK, so she just got a new caravan and needed to test it out, but she couldn’t have stayed in the spare room if she’d wanted to!)
10. You have a big event coming up, you want to have a party, but you are too embarrassed to have friends over.
11. The urge, the need, the desire to tidy up and declutter is too strong to ignore any longer.

Ok, so that’s eleven tips.  Now I’m no lifestyle coach or space clearing expert, so all of this is based on my own experience. I think the hardest part of all is getting started.  We spent an awful lot of time looking around and saying to each other, we really must sort this out, but the energy we could have spent doing it went into dreading it, so we were locked into a cycle of thinking the job was too big and too daunting to tackle.

I guess there’s two ways to approach the getting started bit and it depends on how bad it has got.  We have had six months of stress which in itself wasn’t the reason for our house being such a cluttered mess.  But it was the lack of free weekends and evenings that escalated the problem and it’s only since Derrick was moved to a closer hospital that we felt we had enough time and energy to make that start.

If your house isn’t as bad as ours, then it may be possible to tackle it one room at a time, or even one wardrobe/shelf/drawer at a time.  This is what we plan to do on an ongoing basis if we ever feel ourselves getting over cluttered again.

For us though, it needed a concerted effort, so we made a deal with each other – two consecutive weekends would be dedicated to putting the whole house in order.  We were given the gift of this weekend thanks to the computer workshops not running.  We drafted in good friends to help and we just went for it.

So how did I get Adrian on board?  The king of ‘just in case’, hoarder of mysterious cables, owner of more toolboxes than B&Q and man who refuses to part with original packaging.  Well, here’s my marriage survival guide to getting your man to declutter.

It’s all about getting started. If you’re experiencing a version of the Mexican stand off, then you need to think hard about what you really want – to win the argument and be in control, or do you actually want to get the place sorted out and tidy?  Forget blame and just get on with sorting out your own stuff.  Believe me, decluttering has a momentum of its own once you get going and making that start yourself might be all it needs to get him to join in.

Compromise. If you can’t get an outright commitment to help with the decluttering, see if you can get some level of involvement along the way.  For example, if you are going to tackle your own wardrobe, would he carry the charity bags out to the car for you?  You might be surprised to find he’s willing to put some old clothes in the bag himself, because the job is already started.

Promise you won’t touch his stuff. He’s frightened you’re going to throw away something vital because you don’t realise how difficult it would be to get another twin jack scart usb cable that’s exactly 3.7 feet long and you really would regret it if you ever needed it, not to mention blaming him when the electrical object that might one day need it actually breaks down.  Take that fear away – tell him you are only going to sort out your own stuff, and maybe consult with him on the joint stuff, but you promise his stuff is sacrosanct.

Give him a glory hole. Designate a cupboard or drawer as an amnesty zone where he can stash his clutter safely.  Adrian has one drawer in the kitchen that is his and a study in a wardrobe upstairs that we can shut the doors on.

Get friends involved.  We are lucky to have great friends who are not only willing to help, but do so cheerfully and make the job much more fun than if it was just the two of us.  With other people helping, it reduces the emotional impact of getting rid of stuff  and focuses your decisions – it’s harder to agonise when someone else is holding something over a bin bag asking “keep or get rid?”.

Read ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’.  Seriously, it will help your marriage in general.  To summarise, men need their caves, women need to be specific.  Asking (nagging) him to declutter is too vague and will just evoke irrational fears of what it might mean.  Be specific and ask him to help you sort out a room, a cupboard, a box.

Be the brain, make him the brawn. Ask him to verify decisions rather than make them.  If you ask him what he wants to do with that hideous vase that his Aunt Bertha left to him, he’s put on the spot and has to make a decision.  If you rephrase that to: “I think we can let Aunt Bertha’s vase go to the charity shop, don’t you agree?”, then you’ve taken the pressure off.  This one particularly applies if your man, like mine, has been going through a very stressful time and doesn’t want this process to add to that stress.  He will find it much easier to agree or disagree than make the choice in the first place.

Don’t judge, don’t regret, don’t blame. That goes for yourself as well as him.

You know, I just didn’t realise how much I was going to end up writing here and I’m amazed at how this stuff is just so easy to write – it’s just pouring out of me – I do hope it is of some benefit to other people, because I can’t describe how energising and liberating this whole process is.  It’s actually been an interesting exercise to analyse how we did what we did.  I realise now that what we’re doing here isn’t just decluttering, we are also having a spring clean and very minor refurbish, so this is probably a bigger project than most people need.  Obviously our method won’t work for everyone, but I have some more ideas so I’m just going to keep on writing.  Feel free to ignore the whole lot if you have an immaculate house or no clutter at all!

So, if getting started is the hard part, what can you do to get there?

Make the time. This may be difficult, but it is also number one excuse why you don’t do it.  You will have the same number of hours in the day whether you declutter this weekend or next.  If you have a lot to do, take a day off work (we did this week) and keep the momentum going.

Prepare. Your pre-declutter shopping list should probably include:

• bin bags
• rubber gloves
• lots of drinks, especially in this hot weather
• hayfever and asthma sufferers may be advised to wear a dust mask for seriously neglected piles of clutter
• cardboard boxes
• bin bags
• old newspapers for packing unwanted breakable items
• energy bars, flapjack, fruit cake or similar high energy treats
• more bin bags – strong ones

Make it fun. Play music, involve friends, make up obscure games and score points for things you get rid of.  If you can summon up a light hearted attitude, rather than an ‘OMG what a mess, this is going to take forever’ one, then you’re halfway there already.

Cancel the diet. Don’t try and earn all your halos at the same time!  You’re going to need sustenance while you’re doing this job, so build in some treats along the way, but if you are dieting, please don’t let this be the excuse to fall by the wayside.

Once you have started, you have decisions to make about what to keep and what to get rid of.  As a manager, I have to make decisions all the time, so I can be very focused and make decisions quickly when I have to.  I suspect that many people find this the most daunting aspect of decluttering and it was one of the things that Adrian struggled with at first.  I found myself remembering something I read which really helped and I condensed it into three reasons not to keep something:

• Don’t keep something because it was a gift
• Don’t keep something because it was very expensive
• Don’t keep something because it was a bargain

They are all guilt traps – probably the number one reason we keep stuff we don’t like.  Keep it because you genuinely love it, or you really need it.  Think of the famous William Morris quote: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

Another big reason people keep stuff is fear.  Fear we may need it some day.  Fear that we may forget someone or something if we let it go, or more often, fear of offending or hurting someone if we let it go (we’re back to guilt).  I refused to let fear be a deciding factor in my decision to keep something and that has been hugely  liberating.  I threw away piles of guilt in this last week, but I couldn’t tell you what because it’s gone and forgotten already.

What about memories?  When you lose someone there is a tendency to cling to anything and everything that reminds you of them.  If you are still grieving, then don’t throw anything away, you need some distance to be able to view those things objectively.  They can be put away tidily, and you may need to go through those things with family at a point in the future.

Trust your instinct.  I honestly cannot think of  single thing that I have thrown out in the last week that has caused me a pang of regret.  Pangs are clues to your inner feelings, so whenever I felt one, I would examine my feelings carefully and run through the fire test – if the house was on fire, would I run through burning flames to get it?  I usually had my answer right there, but if in doubt, I’d put it aside and move on to the next thing.  By the time the object got it’s second evaluation, the keep/bin decision had usually crystallised and if it still hadn’t then I would err on the side of caution and keep it.

Finally, my absolute, number one, toppest top tip of them all … take it to the charity shop immediately.  Don’t procrastinate, don’t put it off, don’t keep it for Ebay (unless you genuinely believe you will get enough money to make it worthwhile). Get it OUT OF THE HOUSE.  You know why that’s my top tip?   Some of the clutter we found was stuff we’d already decluttered, put into boxes or bags to go to the charity shop, then it had sat around the house for three years.  I didn’t even remember til I was half way through decluttering it again!!

I shall leave you with a completely genuine interview with a recent de-clutteree husband – I put the questions to him and these are his own answers, totally unedited.  Feel free to use this information in any way you see useful.

How do you feel about the decluttering process?

It’s very hard work and can feel a bit overwhelming, but when you do it, it’s such a good feeling.

How reluctant were you to get involved in the decluttering process?

On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is “yay, yahoo, let’s get on with it” and 10 is ” er,sorry, no I need to do my hair (and I haven’t got any hair)”, I was probably about an 8 initially.

What persuaded you to get on with it?

I was sick of tripping over things – it had reached the point where it had to be done, there was just so much stuff cluttering up our lives.  You know that Anais Nin quote: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” - it’s kind of like that, only with all your old junk.

What advice would you give to other husbands whose wives are nagging them to declutter?

Give in now, you know you’ll have to eventually.  [Editor's note: as IF!]

No, seriously, its a really difficult job to start which is why so many people never do it or avoid doing it, but if you can just make the start, it’s very liberating.  You’re not just getting rid of old physical items you no longer use or need, it’s as if you’re getting rid of old musty dusty thoughts in your head at the same time.  It feels really good.

Are you going to make any changes as a result of this decluttering process?

Yes.  I’m going to buy less stuff, be more prepared to throw old stuff out, and try to keep things tidier.  I think I’m now an advocate of the evolutionary decluttering process rather than the creationist one.  That’s where decluttering happens constantly by means of small changes rather than someone having to say “Let there be tidiness!  Oh, and you’ve got seven days to do it all.”

So there you have it folks, a genuine interview with a genuine husband and veteran of the declutter process.

Good luck!

PS – the word ‘liberating’ crops up 6 times in this post – interesting, huh?