September Reset
There’s a little moment at the beginning of September when the summer holidays and the new school term converge. After weeks of lazy mornings, not knowing what day of the week it is, it's back to alarm clocks, school bags, uniforms and strict schedules. Often the term starts with a couple of days and then almost immediately it's the weekend again, which is actually quite a clever idea, a sort of soft launch back into real life rather than going from zero to five in one hit. So this is the first proper full week back and the aftermath of the summer holidays on the house is real.
By the end of the summer holidays it can feel pretty chaotic. Everyone has been home, people have come and gone, there are dumped bags, things brought back from holidays, the washing has got a little out of control and all sorts of things have migrated from their normal homes, it seems it's not just us that likes to travel in the summer break. So I like to think of September as a kind of new year. After all these years I still get that new-pencil-case feeling. I get the urge to get organised, clear things out, work out where everything lives again and have a good reset.
This year it seems to be coinciding with emptying our storage lock-up, which has made me confront quite how much stuff we have accumulated over the years. Renting a container might be one of the worst decisions you can make… unless you're genuinely moving house and need somewhere to store all your furniture or are running a business and need overflow space I think I can honestly say that they are really just an excuse to put off the decisions you need to make about the stuff you own. But then, we humans seem to be hardwired to store stuff and put things in to containers. One of my sons is studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and recently mentioned an essay he had been reading, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Amongst other things, Le Guin explores the idea that perhaps one of the earliest and most important human inventions wasn’t a weapon or a tool for hunting, but a container — something in which to gather things and carry them home. Once this idea has been planted in your brain it seems obvious. Our entire lives are organised around putting things inside other things.
Our house is a container. We leave it and get into another container, the car, to go somewhere. Inside the house are rooms containing cupboards containing drawers containing boxes containing things. We carry handbags, fill baskets, pack suitcases, stack shelves. We are constantly containing things probably without really noticing that we’re doing it.
Children learn it early. There’s that lovely stage toddlers go through when they start by putting things inside other things. It's actually a watershed moment in development that parents look out for, funnily enough. When a child puts a ball in a cup or a raisin in a box. Anyone who has tried to cook supper with a toddler around their feet will probably recognise it. They take a saucepan out of one cupboard and put it into the cupboard with the cereal. Then the cereal box comes out and is put somewhere with the bowls. They will happily spend ages pottering about moving things from one place to another, with great seriousness. It’s cute, fascinating and infuriating in equal measure!
Of course, what they’re really doing is learning from us. They’re practising one of the things we spend our lives doing: deciding where things belong. And that, I think, is really at the heart of what clutter is.
I go through phases of being incredibly organised. Everything has a place and everything is in its place and, when that happens, tidying up is quick, easy and effortless. You don’t really have to make any decisions, you just put things back where they live. The trouble starts when new things arrive. A parcel comes through the door, someone buys something, you come back from holiday, a child brings something home, you acquire another charger or notebook or pair of shoes and it doesn’t yet have a home. A few of those things are manageable but there's a tipping point and before you know, it there are homeless objects everywhere.
The trouble with the word decluttering is that it sounds like school homework. Clear the weekend, empty the wardrobe onto the bed, buy bin bags and prepare to be ruthless. In fact I could even go as far as saying it sounds like a scary, insurmountable mountain and of course when faced with something overwhelming, we put it off. So what if we took the pressure off and broke it down into smaller, simpler tasks? One such idea is to set a timer for five minutes and choose a drawer, a shelf, the pile by the front door, the bathroom cupboard, anywhere really, and declutter until the timer goes off, and then stop. Don’t be tempted to keep going, overdoing it will make your brain not want to do it again tomorrow (a bit like overdoing it in the gym or committing to a really strict diet- neither is particularly sustainable), so stick to five minutes only. That might seem silly, unproductive, laughable even but five minutes a day is 35 minutes a week. Over a month it’s roughly two and a half hours. Over a year it adds up to more than 30 hours of decluttering. And you never had to commit to a decluttering day. Another method I like is the 5–5–5: Walk around the house and find:
5 things to throw away or recycle.5 things to put away.5 things to donate.
That’s 15 things dealt with almost without noticing. In a family house like ours it can become quite powerful. There are six of us, so if everybody did a 5–5–5 just once a month, that would be 90 things dealt with every month. Over a year, that’s 1,080 things put away, recycled or passed on. Not a bad return for something that probably takes each of us ten minutes once a month. Although I might actually add a fourth category to mine: sell it. Particularly with clothes, there are nearly always things in my wardrobe that I no longer wear but which are far too good to give away or throw away. Selling a few things on eBay or Vinted turns clearing out into a small revenue stream. So perhaps mine needs to become the 5–5–5–5 although that’s not quite as catchy.
Of course, getting rid of things is only half the story. The other half is storage. If you are renovating or designing a house, I think storage is one of the things worth considering very early on rather than trying to squeeze it in at the end. Work out where the vacuum cleaner will go, where the coats will live, where the Christmas decorations will go, where the ugly everyday necessities will disappear to. Work out the storage first and design everything else around that. It might seem deeply unexciting compared to choosing paint colours or fabrics but you will thank me later.
It’s also important to understand that there are three layers.
First there is the invisible kind. Built in cupboards and wardrobes that swallow things up and allow a room to breathe.
Then there is freestanding storage, which can be beautiful in its own right. Armoires, linen presses, chests of drawers. I have an old dentist’s cabinet that I bought in my twenties and still use today. When I bought it it was in its original mid-century ‘Dentist’s Pink’ and, in a moment of folly that I now deeply regret, I painted it white for my first flat. One day I will attempt to strip it back. But, pink or white, it is extremely useful. All those odd things that every house needs but nobody really knows what to do with: batteries, pens, magnets and various mysterious bits and pieces, they all have to go somewhere.
And then there are the containers that live out in the open. I have an old vintage enamel bucket that sits on the side and contains all my chargers. Chargers are not beautiful, the bucket is, problem solved.
Baskets, old boxes, pots, tins and trays can all do the same thing. I don’t particularly want to see the everyday paraphernalia of life, but I don’t necessarily want to hide every useful object behind a fitted cupboard door either- I need easy access. And finally, I firmly believe that every house needs a dumping room. Controversial, I know, but hear me out…Ours at home is technically called the home office. It is where everything goes when nobody knows quite what else to do with it. It's also a brilliant space if you are about to have a dinner party and the dining table is covered with computers, sculptures in progress, paint swatches, drawings (Anyone else’s dining table resemble this? No? Just me?)
In our ‘dumping room’ we have wall to wall shelves stacked with IKEA boxes and I’ve labelled them with little vintage-style office labels. There is a box for pencils, a box for cards, a box for wrapping paper, one for paint, art materials, collage paper (yes we actually collect scrap paper for collages!) one for envelopes, you get the picture.
Maybe not the most glamorous area of the house, but it works, and that is the point. A calm home doesn't have to be an empty home. Mine certainly isn’t. We have books and clothes and chargers and paint and piles of paper and all the ordinary paraphernalia that comes with family life. The calm comes from knowing where things belong. So in a moment of great relief I realise that, this September, I don’t have to embark on an enormous purge after all. Just five minutes here, fifteen things there, a few clothes sold, a few more passed on and gradually the house will begin to breathe a sigh of relief- and I will too. |
One Calm Moment If this has made you think differently about spaces and the moments in between, One Calm Moment takes the idea a step further. It’s my guide to noticing what you already have and creating small moments of beauty around your home. Not by redecorating or buying more, but simply by looking at things differently.
It’s 24 pages exploring my method for creating small moments of beauty from what you already have. One Calm Moment — £20
If today’s essay resonated with you, I’d love you to join me for Weekend Postcard. Every Saturday I send paid subscribers a more personal note from my week — things I’ve noticed, places I’ve been, things I’ve found and loved, and whatever has been occupying my thoughts. Less of an essay, more of a letter. I’d love you to join me. |
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