The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
How to declutter before you downsize
Getting rid of a lifetime of memories can be heartbreaking – but there are ways to make it less painful, reports Ruth Bloomfield
Clutter was overwhelming Claire Shirley’s life. Her hallway was an assault course of boxes and her one-bedroom flat was full (almost literally) to the rafters.
Shirley, 64, has lived in the same flat in Fulham, west London, for 34 years. During that time she had collected far too much stuff for the space. A fear of tackling decades of detritus is often cited by reluctant downsizers as the biggest barrier to them moving house.
Shirley, an English and maths tutor, didn’t want to move, but she did want order. Her home was bursting at the seams with documents, craft equipment for the Brownie pack she runs, some 30 years’ worth of programmes from Crystal Palace Football Club matches, old birthday cards. photographs, paintings and furniture inherited from her mother’s home.
To make matters worse, she was also renting a storage unit, at £320 a month, and that was also fully loaded.
“It was overwhelming and taking over my life,” she says.
“I think the problem was that if I value something, like the football programmes, I can’t bring myself to throw it away.
“I can’t let go of things unless they are going to a good home. And if I felt something could be useful in the future I would squirrel it away.”
Then, last summer, things changed. Shirley took a course with Helen Sanderson, clutter expert and author of The Secret Life of Clutter, to try to understand her addiction to chattels.
She then hired Helen to sort out her home.
Since then she has taken 110 bags for life to charity shops, pruned down her collection of souvenirs, digitised her collections of paintings, pictures, and cards, and sold some furniture and paintings at auction.
The project is still a work in progress – Shirley’s dining room remains full of boxes to be gone through – but so far she is thrilled. “When it is finished it is going to look really fantastic, and it is such a weight off my mind,” she says.
THE SALE RAISED £200,000 For Peter Moore Dutton, clutter was an inherited issue. From the age of 12 to 73 he lived at Tushingham Hall in Cheshire.
The glorious white- stucco property had been purchased by his great, great, great grandfather, Daniel Vawdrey, in 1814 and mementoes, from family portraits, to books, tribal artefacts and hefty pieces of mahogany
When Millie and Freddie Burnet bought their three-bedroom cottage in Fyfield, Hampshire, in 2021, it was in need of a thorough renovation.
Short of cash for furnishings, the couple were grateful for donations from family members, and they filled in the gaps by buying second hand on Facebook marketplace.
The previous owners had also left behind furniture, plus a substantial collection of broken garden furniture, and, although he is small, their miniature dachshund,
Hercule, has plenty of toys and bedding.
Once their daughter, Willow, was born in 2022, she added endless baby equipment to the mix.
“We were drowning in baby stuff. Nobody warns you how much of it there is,” says Millie.
When Millie, 30, returned to work after Willow’s birth, it rapidly became clear that the house no longer worked for the young family.
Freddie is an office worker and they needed to be closer to the grandparents who were helping out with childcare. Last year, the couple decided to put the house on the market, and move to Wilton, near Salisbury.
Before they did so, however, they embarked on a “ruthless” declutter.
Unwanted furniture was either resold or given away. Out also went items of sentimental value such as crockery that had belonged to Millie’s grandparents. Freddie, meanwhile, gave up childhood possessions.
Millie feels that a brutal approach is painful but necessary. “If you never throw things away they become sentimentally valuable because you’ve had them a long time.”
furniture, filled its rooms. Two years ago, Dutton, now 74, and his wife, Valerie, 82, realised that the financial and physical strain of managing the seven bedroom, three bathroom home, plus around 100 acres, was too much for them.
None of Dutton’s grown- up children was interested in taking the hall on and so it was put on the market for £ 1.95m with estate agent Jackson- Stops.
The sale completed last summer and the Duttons now own a three- bedroom bungalow near Malpas, four miles away.
Leaving the property was, of course, a wrench. But trying to decide what to bring with them to their much smaller new home was almost worse.
Most books were either sold or donated. They took a few pieces of furniture, including an 18th century cupboard and a grandfather clock, with them and Dutton’s three children also claimed a few mementoes.
Eventually, more than 700 pieces went under the hammer with Trevanion Auctioneers. In total the sale raised some £200,000.
“It was sad to lose the stuff, but we had to be realistic,” Dutton says . “We had to bite the bullet but it means we have not left it for our children to deal with, which they are relieved about, and we have money if we need to pay for care or anything else.”
‘OUR HOUSE WAS FULL OF BABY THINGS’ Millie Burnet