It started innocently enough, with a four-drawer, transparent acrylic box. A cube organiser for my bathroom, it promised to sort out the mountain of clutter once and for all. No more marauding mini shampoo bottles, rogue cotton buds and homeless scrunchies. All of them would now be confined to one sleek drawer. Ditto makeup, nail polish and spare contact lens holders.
I was so pleased with myself that I went online and bought a second bathroom box and a matching tray. A week later, I bought a home office filing system and an acrylic condiments turntable accessorised with random food storage boxes, including a spaghetti holder with a pleasing pop-up lid. Soon, I was binge-streaming YouTube videos hosted by interiors gurus and, at my lowest ebb, seriously considered investing in a rotating sunglasses organiser that holds an impressive 15 pairs. (Fortunately, just in time, I remembered that I own only one pair, and anyway this is my home, not a shop.)
It was watching the rerun of Channel 4 makeover show Making Space (first shown in 2004) that sucked me into this earlier this year. Until then, I had been happy to embrace innate untidiness as one of my superpowers. OK, my home was in danger of resembling that old Yellow Pages “I’m afraid you’ve been burgled” advert, but I had always been happy to blame the chaos on the fact that I lived in a relatively small space.
The premise of this old makeover show was that Melanie Cantor visited a different home each week, creating space and calm by devising ingenious ways to store everyone’s teetering piles of stuff. The idea was that by imposing order on errant belongings, you could create the illusion of a bigger, more zen-like home. It is a seductive idea.
So much so that it has become extremely popular in the two decades since. Now there are shows such as Get Organized With The Home Edit, which boasts a range of covetable storage bins as well as a series of books to buy, not to mention Marie Kondo, all selling us the idea that tidying is somehow a fast track to a saner, happier life.
But is it really? Ironically, a lot of the storage solutions on offer seem to be about buying more stuff, in the form of aesthetically pleasing boxes. Is clutter such a bad thing?
“Home is supposed to be our sanctuary. It’s where we feel safe,” says Errolie Sermaine, a counsellor and psychotherapist registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. “Disorganisation and clutter can lead to cognitive overload, making it difficult to concentrate and focus on tasks. Even as I’m speaking to you now, I’m looking at a pile of paperwork I need to deal with. It can create confusion and stress about what you haven’t done.”
Several studies back up the theory that clutter can be damaging, including one that found a link to decreased productivity and another that established a link between a messy kitchen and a compulsion to eat unhealthily.
Sermaine says that one person’s tidy is another’s chaos. “Everyone’s standards are different. Some people might spend two hours a day tidying, another might be happy with 10 minutes. What matters is that if your home doesn’t look the way you want it to, then you are going to find it difficult to relax.”
Kate Ibbotson is a psychotherapist and professional organiser. “I don’t think tidying comes naturally to many of us. We’ve grown up with negative messages from parents about tidying our rooms and being messy being bad.” Ibbotson spent 10 years as a probation officer helping people who were homeless or had few possessions. “I’ve seen both sides of it. There’s a privilege in having too much, and sometimes people feel bad about having accumulated so many possessions … We see on the news people who have lost everything. We read about the impact on the environment of overconsumption. It all adds up to guilt and shame. But that’s not a reason to avoid getting a handle on the stuff you own.”
The trouble is that it is so very boring. Perhaps that is why people are embracing the designer-storage trend – it brings some glamour and fun to an area of life that is inherently dull.
Caroline Rogers has a background in positive psychology as well as being a professional organiser. “What I discovered through my academic research, and working with clients, is that when we give ourselves permission to pay attention to our homes, life gets better. It’s not only about homes looking nicer. People’s shoulders drop, and they start talking about ‘Oh, we can finally invite people round for dinner’ or ‘I got a new job’ or ‘Getting the kids to school in the morning is so much easier now we can find everything.’ Basically, as organisers we’re giving people permission to pay attention to this seemingly boring thing.”
I can understand why people call in the experts. My adventures at streamlining are not going well. Too late, I realise that the drawers in my bathroom organisers are too fiddly and shallow to see what’s in them. It is driving me mad trying to find anything. Also, if you are naturally untidy, the chances are high that you will create messy storage drawers.
Vicky Silverthorn has worked as a professional organiser for 14 years. She got the idea for her business while she was working as Lily Allen’s PA and overheard someone on tour saying “You need a Vicky” – which duly became her brand name. “People are obsessed with finding the right jars and containers, but that’s not the real issue,” she says. “They see the immaculate pictures on Instagram and they try to recreate it at home. But it just isn’t practical and it can create more stress and more clutter. We organise up to 15 homes a week and I can tell you we are sending an awful lot of plastic storage boxes to charity.”
Silverthorn observes that merely buying storage isn’t going to give you this magic talent for organising. “People typically go out and buy storage and then think: ‘Oh, what can I put in this box to make it look pretty? Let’s fill the containers and then we’ll be organised.’”
This is all sounding horribly familiar. “Imagine someone has a very disorganised kitchen,” says Silverthorn. Looking around at my countertop strewn with boxes, runaway cashew nuts and displaced lightbulbs, I tell her I am trying hard to visualise such a space.
“People go out and buy a bunch of pretty jars. They stick labels on them and put in all their pasta, flour, sugar, everything. For the first week, heaven. Second week, something has moved to the back and you get annoyed and move the container beside the cooker where you can get at it. Six months later the place is in chaos. Also, most people don’t bother measuring up their space before buying storage, with predictable results.” Guilty as charged. What’s more, my pop-up spaghetti holder is now beside the cooker, and its lid appears to have jammed shut.
In Silverthorn’s kitchen, she puts food packets into storage boxes so she can retain cooking instructions and sell-by dates. All her tins and boxes are stored in a single row on shelves with duplicates behind them “like a shop”. Doesn’t that look messy and overwhelming?
“No, because here’s the key to decluttering that people don’t realise – you need to buy less. The shops are there to store our food, not our cupboards,” says Silverthorn. “Think about it. How often do you need tomatoes? And how often do you walk past the shop?”
That evening I decide to excavate my kitchen cupboards. I unearth several varieties of tinned lentils and beans, most of them out of date, some sardines dating from years ago when I read about the benefits of oily fish, and 13 tins of tomatoes. As I live within minutes of three large supermarkets, I have to concede that overconsumption is my problem.
Another issue with storage is overorganising. “We see this a lot,” says Ibbotson. “People don’t realise that the upkeep of all these systems is time-consuming. Sometimes people want to divide things into micro-categories. For example, children’s toys are a common clutter nightmare. I had one woman who wanted to have a box for soft toys, a box for noisy toys, a box for small cars. Is it realistic that either you or your child is going to sort them out every night? Or would it be better just to have one big toy chest?”
So, do we really need to put everything in boxes at all? I am beginning to question that idea. “Whatever is around you is affecting you non-stop, 24 hours a day, even if you decide not to look at it any more,” says Marie Diamond, author of Your Home Is a Vision Board. Diamond is Steven Spielberg’s personal organiser and feng shui consultant, as well as advising many other Hollywood stars.
“You might say, well, I don’t intend to look at that stuff but on an unconscious level you do. When you tidy stuff away where it’s hidden from view, you’re creating energy and space for new things to come into your life,” says Diamond.
She counsels against displaying too many items from the past, such as old books and sentimental items. “You’re surrounding yourself with old energy. The key is being more mindful and paying attention to what is in your environment.”
But surely memories of the past can make us feel good about ourselves? Ibbotson agrees. “The contents of our homes are tied strongly to self-identity. Books are talismans. We want other people to look at them and make assumptions about the type of person we are, where we’re going in life and how we want to be seen.”
I am drowning in hundreds of books and they are creating chaos. But I love books. Diamond is stern about this. “When you are on holiday and you walk into a hotel room, don’t you enjoy that feeling of everything being tidy and fresh?” I admit that I do. “And how would you feel if the management didn’t bother cleaning that room? You would be grumpy.” Inarguable. “So, what you need to do is start behaving like you’re the hotel manager of your own home.”
Although I think it sounds like a daft idea, later on I find myself doing an interview at a hotel in central London. I notice a couple of small bookcases in the lounge, one containing books about gardens, the other books about London. The idea of curating books like this has never occurred to me. Again, blaming shortage of space, I tend to shove new purchases into the shelves I’ve already got or, worse, stack them in a precarious tower on the floor.
That weekend, I search online and order a couple of small bookcases that will fit in spare corners. One will be for books about Scotland, the other for India-themed books, a nod to my dual heritage. “I am the hotel manager of my own home, I am winning at life,” I tell myself.
Diamond has some advice on bedrooms too. “You want everything in your bedroom to be harmonious, to be a space of wellbeing and love. Believe me, I have seen everything being stored on nightstands. Can you believe, I’ve even seen tax forms?” I pretend to be as shocked as she is – I don’t have the nerve to tell her that there are six years of HMRC printouts stored in mine.
Isn’t there a chance that all this organising can become obsessive? “It can be a positive distraction for some people, something healthy,” says Sermaine. “But when organising starts to become more important than, say, spending time with family and friends; if it’s getting in the way of work or perhaps you’re missing medical appointments in order to keep up with it, then things have gone too far. Ditto if a person’s need to clean becomes a way of hypercontrolling their environment.” One way this might play out is if, say, someone visits your home and you have a meltdown if your meticulously ordered things get messed up.
Ibbotson believes that it is easy to get so addicted to creating the perfect home storage setup that it becomes all-consuming. This is particularly true for those who live in rented accommodation or shared spaces, where someone may have little control over their environment. She says: “The before-and-after makeovers are so dramatic; they give you a mini dopamine hit. It’s exciting. Fantasising about being able to do that yourself can become a distraction from taking concrete steps towards actually moving your life forward. If you end up chasing an expensive fantasy, you would be better off focusing on more realistic ways to feel content.”
I can’t help but agree. Now, is anyone in the market for some lovely acrylic storage drawers?
