Decluttering is a painful process when you see magic in the mess
Katie Fforde’s family want her to tidy up. But, like Princess Anne, she believes a home should reflect the lives of its owners
Iam being confronted by my daughter Briony, holding up my favourite cashmere cardigan – soft, comfortable, baggy, full of holes – that has warmed me and cheered me for years. “Oh, I must keep that,” I say, ‘I wrote…”
“We don’t need a whole story,” Briony says impatiently. “Do we keep it, yes or no?”
I know the answer she wants is no, and so it is put in the bag.
People have been trying to make me tidy up all my life. First it was my mother who nagged, wrote notes, emptied my drawers on to my bed so I would be forced to tidy them. Once, when my husband, Desmond, was away at sea and I had really dreadful flu plus a baby and two toddlers, I had to ask her to come and help. She stood over my bed and told me I had to get a skip and throw everything away.
I never told my own children to tidy their rooms; there was never a moment when my bedroom wasn’t more untidy than theirs. Luckily my husband is the same or we would have driven each other mad.
We live in an old house in the Cotswolds. We have lived here for 40 years and over that time we have acquired a lot of pictures, a few ornaments, and bits and pieces passed down from the family. However tidy I think it is, no one will ever describe my home as minimalist.
But it seems that my husband and I are on trend: my royal neighbour Princess Anne has become the unlikely poster girl for the latest TikTok trend #cluttercore – an interiors movement that celebrates “stuff”. It comes after the Princess Royal last year shared a glimpse of her cosy living room, stuffed full of her favourite knick-knacks, as she watched the Scottish rugby team beat England in the Calcutta Cup. It seems that the royal’s Gatcombe Park home in Gloucestershire is a shrine to clutter.
I feel that a fully decluttered house would be soulless. Emptiness set off by a few perfect objects chosen to compliment the off-white walls would be like living in an art hotel.
A home should reflect the lives and the characters of the owners. There
should be things about the place that tell their story.
During lockdown, when everyone else was making sourdough (even those who don’t eat bread) and decluttering, I made a few batches of peppermint creams with 100 per cent cocoa solids and wrote my books. Friends would say, “I’m just doing one room at a time. It’s so cleansing. I’ve halved my possessions.” I thought, while I would like to have less clutter, I’m busy doing my job. I don’t have time to wonder if things “spark joy” and I certainly don’t have time to roll my clothes in a certain way.
Also, I run out of decision-making energy very quickly. We once had to empty our entire house for a very major make-over-repair job and it was agony. I know that we kept things that should have gone because if you can’t instantly decide, you keep it. I got to the point when if anyone else suggested that this process should be making me happy, I would have to kill them.
However, I recently had my bathroom remodelled. This is also where I keep my clothes and put my make-up on. A lot of things came out of the wardrobes, and cupboards that I thought were safe were dismantled in the search for mystery pumps. We were on holiday when this initial work was done and when we came back the upstairs hallway was piled high with everything I owned. It was chaos. Decluttering became not so much a luxury but a necessity. I told my daughter how daunting I found the prospect. She saw it as a challenge.
It’s one thing avoiding a mother’s constant complaining, but it’s much harder to resist a daughter, particularly when she gets her sisters-in-law, Heidi and Anastasia, involved. Which brings us back to my faithful old cashmere cardigan. Briony had probably heard me talking about one of the many decluttering programmes there are on television where lovely young men visit untidy houses wearing boiler suits and tool belts. I’d probably murmured that I’d like them to visit me. That was it. She saw I was ready to make a change. They staged an intervention. For Christmas they gave me a Golden Ticket for Decluttering and made a plan.
These are three organised, determined women, but even they realised decluttering wasn’t going to be a quick process, at least not in my house. And they also could see that putting all my clothes on the bed as Marie Kondo recommends in her best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up wasn’t an option. I probably won’t be able to sleep in the bed ever again.
They went for a three pronged attack. One daughter-in-law tackled the drawers in my bedside table. When I saw the amount of cough sweets, tissues, herbal sleeping tablets, pain killers and indigestion tablets that issued from these small drawers, before the silk eye masks, bed socks, pillow sprays, books, Kindles (yes, two of them) and lavender oil even got a look in, I was amazed. Now, it is all packed neatly. I actually have an empty drawer and a safe place to put my glasses when I take them off at night. And also a safe surface to put a glass of water. Never again will I knock over a glass and break a Kindle in the same fumbling gesture.
Then there was the cupboard where my make-up was kept. Now, my complete inability to pass a make-up counter without being sold some wonder product I would never use was exposed. But as this was being dealt with by a daughter-in-law, any criticism was silent. She just put aside anything she thought should be chucked, mostly because I bought it when my daughter was getting married some 10 years earlier. I didn’t claw back much. I still have a lot of bottles of perfume on the go though. But because so much was jettisoned, there is now space!
My second daughter-in-law tackled the jumpers, tops and sundry items.
She folded in a Marie Kondo way so that I could see at a glance what was what. I threw away whole sections.
My granddaughter, Tallulah, 10, has recently joined the team. She is a joy. She genuinely doesn’t judge and wants to take home lots of things I’ve never known what to do about.
My actual daughter insisted that my clothes should be colour coded. I am still reeling from this. It is so unlike me. But I’m doing it! Probably because I
So many of the things around me mean something – I am very sentimental
know she might come into my house, open the wardrobe and give me that look if there is a navy blue item among the whites and greys. Doesn’t this process draw attention to the fact that one tends to buy the same clothes, over and over again? How many long cream cardigans does any one person need? About half a dozen fewer than I own.
There is still a lot more decluttering that needs to be done. I am dreading the intervention team attacking my office at some point, although that is the untidiest space of all. I would quite like some built-in bookcases and would need to take everything out. But I have kept up with the tidiness regime. I’ve even taken things further and got rid of more items. I’m still wondering if I should put the very many pairs of socks I want to eject into pairs before they go, or can I just put them all in a bag?
I don’t think of myself as a person who likes clutter. I don’t have ornaments unless they mean something, but the trouble is, so many of the things I have around me do mean something. I am very sentimental. I don’t like to throw away things that have belonged to someone I loved. I also love pictures and have far too many. Don’t even mention the books.
I think it would be fair to say that I’ll never have a fully decluttered home, but one day perhaps it will be a tidy one. Imagine Monica’s apartment in Friends. She is famously a “neat-nik”; but her home has quite a lot of random stuff in it. A middle way must be possible.
My favourite room in the house is my kitchen. It is full of stuff. There are plates hanging on the walls and on high shelves. These include the souvenirs brought back from holiday by my aunt and uncle. There are huge serving dishes bought by one mother-in-law from a local antique shop. There is a dresser full of French dishes that belonged to my other mother-in-law, including a huge one she used to make bread in every day. And it’s not just inherited things. I buy hand-thrown bowls that I don’t need just because they are lovely. Having them around me in my kitchen, along with the paintings, the batterie de cuisine hanging from hooks gives me joy.
I think I’m more of a William Morris person: “Have nothing in your house you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I see beauty in the strangest things.