The Weight of Clutter

We all own too much stuff. Most of us have books we read decades ago but have not picked up since, CDs we haven’t played for years, and clothes and shoes that we rarely wear, if ever. What we have is clutter, and a cluttered home makes for a cluttered mind. For me, clutter is like noise - painful and intrusive.

 

Over the years I have made efforts at decluttering, sorting through clothes, books, and CDs in a desultory fashion and disposing of a pitiful amount of stuff, the net result being only a minimal reduction in the clutter.

 

There are any number of decluttering tips to be found online, such as getting rid of two items for every one you acquire, and disposing of things you haven't used for a year. Marie Kondo, the Japanese professional organizer and consultant, has a principal that you should keep only those possessions that spark joy.

  

Marie Kondo

Some possessions can be hard to get rid of, especially those that hold sentimental value. It can be difficult to separate the possession from the memory, but discarding the possession does not mean that the memory is tarnished or lost. Or, we justify keeping things in the belief that what we now treasure will be similarly treasured by our children; having cleared out my mother’s house when she died, and that of my late mother-in-law, I can see that that is true of only a tiny number of keepsakes. 

Sometimes there is a powerful incentive to declutter, and Val and I recently encountered one: We moved house.

 

Moving house is one of the most stressful life events that we will ever undertake voluntarily, and our recent move was probably the most stressful of the six that I have made, even more so because it was our first for 25 years.

 

After a quarter of a century in our four-bedroom house we decided to downsize, what with our daughters having moved out. Our house was in desperate need of some TLC, crying out for a refit of both bathrooms, a new boiler, redecorating, and a complete overhaul of the plumbing, which had caused us no end of headaches over the years and cost us a shedload of money.

 

Val has always hankered after living by the sea, and some years ago a move to Eastbourne was mooted. I was reluctant, largely because I didn’t want to move somewhere that would make it hard to travel to watch my beloved Romford FC. Five years ago, we compromised and bought a flat in Eastbourne – I say flat, it’s actually a bedsit with a bed that folds into the wall – that we could visit whenever we chose. It proved to be a fortunate decision.

It might not look like much, but this is what we lived with for four months.

"Compact and bijou"

As for our permanent move, we chose Rotherhithe and a house close to the Thames. At our time of life, when most people decide to move outward from London’s suburbs, moving further into London did cause a few raised eyebrows, but after a few false starts, we found a house that we both loved, in a location that we found fascinating, and after finding a buyer for our property, put in an offer that was accepted. Now the fun started.

 

Since the sale of our property was advancing quickly, synchronising sale and purchase did not look possible, but we were keen to have as small a gap between the two as we could, and since the house we were buying was empty, the seller’s estate agents (who proved to be completely hopeless, unlike the agents dealing with our sale, who were excellent) assured us that we should be able to move in with minimal delay. The minimal delay turned out to be five months.

 

In the end, and in order not to lose our buyers, we agreed to move out and decamp to Eastbourne while our purchase proceeded. We packed up all the possessions that would move with us, and the removers took them away and put them in storage.

 

There were tough decisions to make deciding what we could keep and what we had to dispose of. There were multiple trips to charity shops to donate things, and many trips to the tip to throw away other stuff. Come completion day, and with the removers having taken most of our things a few days earlier, we attempted to pack the things we were taking to Eastbourne into the car. The only way it was all going to fit was if the car drove itself and so even just a couple of hours before we moved out, I was making trips to the tip with things that we could not transport. As it was, there was room in the car only for a driver so Val had to travel to Eastbourne by train.

 

When we unpacked at our flat there was a sense that we were trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot, even though we had brought just the essentials. Having moved out in mid-November 2024, we still harboured hopes that we would complete on our purchase by Christmas.

 

As Christmas approached, a bombshell dropped. The partners at the firm of solicitors acting for the seller were struck off and the firm went out of business. The sellers appointed new solicitors but we were effectively back to square one. A further complication stemmed from the property we were buying being on a private estate, with a management company involved.

 

The enquiries dragged on for weeks and our solicitors were finding it hard to get answers, so much so that by February we were contemplating abandoning the whole thing, going with our Plan B, and buying a house in Eastbourne as by now we had become pass masters at commuting up to London for gigs, football, and meeting friends, even though it sometimes entailed an overnight stay in a hotel.

 

Eventually, after much stress and compromise (mostly on our part, the seller was quite inflexible with a few proposals we made) we completed, having been in Eastbourne till late-March 2025. What our experience taught us was that we still owned too much stuff because as the weeks grew into months, we realised that we could live quite happily without many of our possessions. The only thing we really missed during our time in Eastbourne was broadband.

 

It was still a few days before our removers were able to deliver our furniture and other belongings, and when they did, we realised that our sofas and some other furniture would not really work in our new home and we had to ask them to dispose of them for us. Even then, having unpacked more than seventy boxes of clothes, books, CDs and other assorted possessions, we decided that in the interests of limiting clutter, lots had to go. Numerous trips to charity shops and the tip have followed.

 

These are very edited highlights of our moving experience, but one thing that I need to emphasise is how enlightening it was. Neither Val nor I expected to be living in a bedsit for four months, but it proved invaluable in teaching us what was important and what wasn’t. We feel much lighter and happier for the decluttering that circumstances drove us to and we are determined that we will not allow our new home to become messy and full of things that don’t add value. It will be an ongoing process, but one which we now feel much more capable of approaching effectively.