They lurk like monsters in the closet. All the things that need sorting out and, left unchecked, mount into threatening piles. No matter how often they get tamed, they soon revert to a scary mess.
Enter the clutter buster, aka, Jane Andrew. The Cape Town equivalent of global decluttering icon, Marie Kondo, she brings order to chaos.
Andrew acts as a catalyst to start decluttering, helps when decision fatigue sets in (it does) and has a gift for organising rooms. “As a child, I would not only tidy my own room and give away toys, but I would do it for my friends and family too,” she says.
On the first day of the school holidays, her mother would help her kids declutter their rooms. “That routine has stuck with me and I tend to do it every season now,” she says. “Small routines help with the bigger picture, like the ‘one item in, out item out’ concept.
Small routines help with the bigger picture
— Declutter professional, Jane Andrew
“When you want to declutter, set a timer or choose a section so you do not overwhelm yourself and make sure you stop on a good note,” she advises.
When Andrew walked into my Hout Bay apartment on a sunny morning, she claimed to be pleasantly surprised at the uncluttered and clear living space. As far as clients go, I am an outlier, she says: typically, people with messy cupboards have messy living spaces. But then again, Andrew has to act politely, as she demonstrated when she opened my cupboard doors.
What she saw — note the tense — were shelves overflowing with sports kit, cables, old clothes, documents, newspaper clippings, photos and other sentimental stuff.
I had never got rid of things and they accumulated over decades. The biggest handicap is being from Gen X. I grew up, studied and travelled the world in a pre-digital era so my life is a messy paper trail.
Ironically, my aversion to clothes shopping is a second achilles heel. The bedroom cupboard was overloaded with garments going back 20 or more years and not hip vintage ones either, just worn out items.
Tidying the cupboards has always been a Sisyphean task which I used to avoid until it became more effort to find things than to repack the cupboards, once again.
Working with Andrew for three mornings has transformed the cupboards downstairs — the teen bedroom upstairs is off limits — so that everything has a place and it’s easy to put items back where they belong, long before they end up on tables, floors and couches.
Her decluttering system differs from Kondo’s and works well if you're decluttering over weeks. She works systematically: one section at a time, clockwise around a room, from the top down. Kondo’s method is to collect everything that belongs together (for example, every book) into a single pile to sort out.
“When you are clearing out an entire house, I start with the easiest place, for example, a hallway or the kitchen,” says Andrew, who has had to tunnel her way through crowded passages.
“The kitchen is a clutter magnet but it's not an emotional area. I tend to leave books and sentimental things until last. Sometimes I start with a person’s car,” she says. “People are often embarrassed, but I've seen it all.”
Her mantra is simple: to eliminate the excess stuff you don’t use (what is its purpose?) or don’t love (does it bring pleasure?).
We started with our study, which now has a spartan appearance and is well organised. The kitchen and living room didn't need attention. The bedroom was easy because most of one cupboard was sports kit and the other, clothes. After the “keep-donate-sell-throw away” decisions were made, the collection was limited.
But that's not the end of the process. Andrew provides guidance on where to take stuff to be donated or sold and helped drop off items at a charity shop on her way home. She suggests having a permanent donation box to give away.
“If you work with a couple, often one person is more comfortable letting go than the other. The best way to address this is to keep their stuff separate, and you go at their pace,” she says.
Andrew looks for the logical place for possessions, fitting these choices together like pieces of a puzzle.
Given my limited time (and budget), I had outstanding tasks after this spring-cleaning sweep. I've not yet opened a trunk full of paper files. I've made decisions on the clothes in the “maybe” pile. But the boxes of photos and letters are waiting, likely for a rainy day.
What counts is that our practical, everyday possessions are well organised, easy to find and easy to put back.
“My niece summed it up when she was five and I helped her clean her room,” says Andrew. "‘This feels like freedom’, she said to me."
“A lot of clients find decluttering therapeutic and say it helps productivity. It adds value to your life,” says Andrew.
The rewards of helping people with decluttering — which she did as a hobby — prompted her to go full time three years ago, and the demand for her services is growing. A morning costs the equivalent of a modest meal out for two (R390 per hour).
Covid lockdown gave people a chance to organise their homes but you don’t have to wait for the next pandemic to do this, and it's easier with a dragon-slayer at your side.
• Jane Andrew of Clutter Free donated one morning of her time towards this story.
