How I revamped my home after a break-up

After Liadan Hynes separated, her best friend recommended an appointment with decluttering expert Sarah Reynolds. Here, she describes the process of rebuilding one’s home

EVEN before she arrived at my house, I was arguing with Sarah Reynolds in my head. “Yes, I know the hall is full of clutter. And yes, there may be piles of laundry in the bedroom… But it has been a difficult time.” “You need to go to this woman, I hear she’s amazing,” the best friend had announced, in the manner of one pulling a white rabbit from an apparently empty hat. She was struggling at the time to get the pram past the random stuff gathered in our hallway. “Most of her clients have had a death or a divorce, I hear. Perfect!”

I am in the latter category. A separation; not yet a divorce.

When you separate, your home becomes both a sanctuary, and a statement of intent. Dealing with any kind of grief is physically exhausting. Life can feel like moving through cotton wool, or maybe sludge.

At the beginning, the weeks feel like a slog, as if you are balancing endless plates above your head, and you drag yourself, utterly weary, to the shelter of another weekend, and the comfort of your couch, your home. The security of your own abode.

Gradually though, things get easier. You ease into your new life. You’re ready to take it on rather than suffer through it. To make something of it, on your own terms. And your home becomes a manifesto of sorts.

Where you live, after all, is the first territory upon which you establish this new life. The place you come to terms with the new normal. Grow used to living without another adult. Ensure a base that this is solid, comfortable, secure for your child. Whatever the unplanned catastrophe that has swooped in, divorce, or death, organising your house allows you to bring a sense of control back to your life.

After the storm, peace will eventually descend, and there is nothing more comforting and soothing, when life has been thrown up in the air, than pottering peacefully around your own home. Hanging out with your child, cooking meals, having family and friends over. At ease in your own place. This is the stuff that gradually puts life back together, that helps recreate that solid foundation.

A professional organiser, Sarah Reynolds wrote the definitive Irish book on decluttering; Organised; simple ways to declutter your house, your schedule and your mind. The book is beautifully laid out, easy to read, and interesting — it won’t make you feel guilty, this is not an exercise in feel-bad-and-better-yourself February blues.

She arrives for our first appointment all businesslike; her manner is that of your favourite school teacher, firm, but with a gleam in her eye. The meeting is for her to take in the house as a whole, and it says much about her tact that I do not feel in the slightest bit defensive as she pokes around the place. It’s actually fascinating stuff; like watching someone play Tetris with your belongings.

“Sheets are in press in the other bedroom, towels should be moved to join them,” she mutters to herself. “That space is unused, would be suitable for the box currently taking up space in kitchen.”

The next appointment is where we really get stuck in.

Clean surfaces are key to Sarah’s system. A surface is not just a table. Floors, tops of presses, mantel pieces; all are surfaces. The more decluttered they are, the calmer your home will feel. When decluttering, she explains, pick a large surface, and clear it. Kitchen or dining room table, bed. Then pick your area of choice to clear out — a shelving unit, a cupboard, the toy boxes, wardrobes, and put the contents out on your surface.

This is where the whittling takes place. What do you not need? What belongs in another room (no endlessly wandering off to return it; put in a pile, the whole lot goes to the other room at once, at the end).

“Where do you think we should start?” I quaver, before boldly announcing: “We’re not going near the clothes!” She smiles. It is testament to Sarah’s perspicacity that she announces we will start with paperwork. It wouldn’t have been obvious to most, but there was a huge pile of to-do paperwork that I had procrastinated over for months. Of all the clutter in our house (and I’d like to think things were not too bad, “average,” she tells me later), this was the thing causing me most stress.

So we hit up my desk (I work from home) and the dresser which acts as a filing cabinet. She arrives with one of those large blue IKEA bags full of storage solutions, and Mary Poppins-like, begins pulling out various sizes of containers. Before I know it, the stuffed drawers, those ones we all have bursting with everything from keys, batteries, bike locks, and candles, is suddenly streamlined, divided into four crisp white IKEA containers.

Diving into your paperwork with a complete stranger might not always be the easiest of things. But even when we overturn my marriage certificate, I didn’t feel remotely awkward. In fact, we laughed conspiratorially at the occasional bizarreness of life. What pile should that go in, we speculate? There’s a quiet kindness to Sarah that puts you at ease. It is an attitude, perhaps somewhat informed by her own story. Reynolds has been working as a professional organiser since 2011, before that, her professional background was in human resources, and television production with RTE; both areas guaranteed to improve one’s people managing skills. “I always tidied. My parents would go out on a Saturday night, and I’d tidy a kitchen cupboard,” she smiles.

She was watching Oprah Winfrey with her mother, one day, and a segment with a professional organiser, when she first realised this could be an actual career. “As Oprah would say it was an a-ha moment,” she laughs. Eventually, she trained with this same woman, Julie Morgenstern, in New York. Back to RTE after a year’s career break, she set up her website in order to see if a sideline career might be possible, and roughly six months later, got her first client.

This first appointment was, she recalls now, “so nerve wracking. You’re pretending that this is your full-time job. Totally acting your way though it. But I think every entrepreneur does that. There is a huge counselling element to it,” she says of her work. “I have learnt on the job, and also through my own experiences, about that whole side of it.

“People, who come to me, are always in a life transition; good or bad. It can be anything from a baby, to moving house, to retirement, to a divorce, to going back to college.”

As she describes it, clients are often almost immobilised by their own feelings by the time they get to Sarah. “The greatest difficulty people

struggle with is not knowing where to start. They’re just so overwhelmed. That causes great anxiety. They’re usually very time poor, and they want to get everything right, so they are second guessing themselves. There’s a huge line of perfectionism running through it. You wouldn’t think that somebody who is surrounded by clutter is a perfectionist, but they are. Perfectionism can stop you doing anything. Because you’re not going to do anything at all if you can’t do it perfectly.”

She, herself, was engaged to a man she had been with for six years. “Unfortunately, one day he left,” she says in her characteristically calm, to the point manner. “I was devastated. I’ve had to do an awful lot of work on myself in order to get back to stability. It literally threw everything into flux.”

She was in the early days of being self-employed; “Obviously I had quit RTE with the reassurance of financial security, of getting married. So the rug was completely pulled from underneath me, especially financially.”

There was also the shock of being on one’s own, romantically and professionally. “Any business owner will tell you it’s a very lonely process. So you had the loneliness of a relationship breaking down, and the loneliness of not having a nine-to-five job, with colleagues, and that distraction. I am very good at motivating myself, but, my god, was I tested.” Declutter your life ... Sarah Reynolds professional organiser and author (left) helped Liadan Hynes get back on track. Photo Kip Carroll (inset) queen of clean Marie Kondo as seen on Netflix

This was in 2015. The first two months were a blur, she recalls now. She worked as much as she could; covering costs to stay in the North Dublin home near where she grew up was a priority. “I just felt like I had lost so much that I was not losing my apartment as well,” she reflects now.

It took her several months to face the task of getting rid of her ex’s belongings. The prospect of allowing him to come and collect them was simply too hard. “I was so devastated with him leaving, that I couldn’t watch him leave a second time.”

Her own loss has informed her compassionate, kind approach with clients. “I know exactly how it is to get rid of stuff; I’m still getting rid of stuff. I’ve taken photos before I’ve gotten rid of stuff. I took a photo of his stuff hanging in the wardrobe, because I was so sad at it leaving.

‘Sarah took a photo of her ex’s stuff hanging in the wardrobe, because she was so sad at it leaving’

You can’t force it. The time will arrive when you’re ready to let go of something. But at the same time you cannot wallow in it; things have to shift and move on.”

In a year, that by normal standards was fairly chaotic, my threehour session of decluttering and chatting with Sarah still stands out as a little oasis of calm. “When your life is turned upside down and chaotic, your environment takes a hit,” Sarah reflects. “You want to be able to come back to your home and your sanctuary and rest. Get your head together and figure things out. Sometimes, in the midst of all this chaos, clutter can build up. Now that I have gone through it myself, I am convinced that organisation helps you feel better, and more in control, during a time when you’re feeling out of control.”

Putting methods of organisation into place makes staying on top of the clutter so much easier, she explains. During her own break up, she would come home from a job and lie on the couch, watching hours of Netflix. “I didn’t want to wash the dishes, go food shopping, do anything.

“But because my apartment already had this underlying system I had put in place, if the place got messy, even through my exhaustion, I was able to go ‘OK just give it till Saturday morning and it will clear up. Or just 20 minutes after dinner, and then you can go back to the couch.’”

On the subject of Marie Kondo, she speculates that a mop might not bring much delight, yet she wouldn’t be without one.

“I love the Marie Kondo Netflix documentary series. It’s great to see her in action,” she says.

She agrees with Kondo that, above all else, there should be joy.

And she is right. Sometimes, in amongst the storm, it is the little things. Every time I open my streamlined dresser with its labelled stationary boxes and pristine white containers, still, months later, I get a kick of joy.