Robertson - Declutter: the get-real guide to creating calm from chaos

Debora Robertson is an author and journalist who has written for major publications including the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Times, the Guardian, Delicious magazine, BBC Good Food, Red, Country Living and Sainsburys Magazine. Her books and articles cover all things food, drink, garden and home related.

We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us.
WINSTON CHURCHILL

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What do you want your life to look like? If you have picked up this book, Im guessing not like it looks right now. Too much stuff and not enough space to store it? Too much time spent feeling overwhelmed, not enough calm? Weekends full of To-Do lists that never seem to get any shorter? Terrified that anyone might just drop in? Instead of nurturing you, is your home a source of stress, guilt and even shame?

You are not alone. Its the nature of modern life that new possessions flood into our homes all the time. When a T-shirt is as cheap as a sandwich, every newspaper comes with a hundredweight of supplements and the online shopping emporia never close, is it surprising that we find ourselves swamped beneath things we neither love, want nor need?

I know how you feel because I have been right where you are now. When I first moved to London after I graduated 30 years ago, I had a suitcase, a typewriter (they really did exist) and a small room on the top floor of a friends house. Over the years, I moved to larger places, but I never seemed to have more space.

I have always loved decorating and furnishing my homes with a mixture of new things, family pieces that have been handed on to us, objects Ive hunted down at antiques fairs and auction houses, and prizes Ive lugged back from holidays abroad. I work as a food writer and often have photo shoots at my house, and this emboldened and enabled me as I picked up another bashed-up old pan, vintage tablecloth or set of plates. (Theyll come in useful, Id say, as much to myself as to my husband, as I loaded another boxful of treasures into the car.) And then there were the books. Thousands of them. Ive always loved to read and have never met a bookshop I could walk past. Add to this that, for my job, Im sent the latest cookbooks to review and, well, lets just say Ikeas Billy bookcase and I have become very good friends.

What I am saying to you is that I am not one of natures minimalists. I like things. Lots of them. My house is colourful, comfortable and welcoming, which is important as no one loves a party more than me. Dinner for ten, lunch for twenty, drinks for fifty, family Easters and Christmases bring it on. Planning menus is my yoga.

But slowly, gradually, my somewhat maximalist house started to spin out of control. Suddenly, I could see how easy it might be to slip over from collector to hoarder. All the parties I so loved throwing were blighted by the minimum half-day of clear-up Id have to do before I got to the fun bit of setting the table and cooking the food. Stacks of books and magazines cluttered every surface, clothes bulged from wardrobes and drawers, and I couldnt use a lot of the gorgeous, vintage-y things Id collected because they were in the cellar somewhere and, well, you just didnt want to go down there without a pith helmet and an axe.

This is when I decided I had to get a grip before I turned into one of those people you occasionally see in local papers who have been unable to leave their houses for years because their hallways are full of Christmas decorations they bought on sale and garden furniture thatll come in useful just as soon as they can excavate a path to the back door.

I began by buying more things, naturally, because a new life needs new stuff. I bought all the books that were going to tell me how to do it and all the pretty boxes that were going to give me somewhere to put it all. Like many of you, Im sure, I was seduced by the promises of order offered by every shiny new decluttering method I could find, only to have lethargy, procrastination or sentiment chop off my good intentions at the knees.

While I admired the philosophy of Zen-like minimalism so many of these books espoused (I am looking at you, dear Marie Kondo), fundamentally they didnt really speak to me or to seem approachable for most of the people I know people whose efforts at streamlining need to fit around normal, busy lives filled with work or school, family commitments or housemates, and a life that may not revolve around a perfectly curated knife drawer.

Many decluttering books presume you can breezily ditch a lifetime of memories and possessions between breakfast and Pilates. You are not that person. I am not that person. And thats why so many of these systems break down. After the first flurry of enthusiasm, they are incompatible with the way most of us want to live.

The truth is, when it comes to organizing and decluttering, there is no one-size-fits-all ideal. This book will help you find your own comfort level. That may be minimalist, or it may be cosier than that, but whatever it is, its right for you, which means your new-look life will be much easier for you to maintain in the long term.

This book will help you create new habits by banishing the paralyzing philosophy of should and by getting rid of guilt. It will encourage you to keep going by concentrating not on what you are losing, but on what you will gain space, energy, freedom and peace. It will show you how to organize from the inside out, for who you really are, not for who you think you should be. Because when we get the inside right, the outside tends to fall into place. And most importantly, I hope it will demonstrate that you can live more without having more.

My get-real guide will help you create your own, tailor-made approach, one that you can refine and adapt, whatever your situation. It will help you create good habits that you can fold into the life you live right now, without waiting for some mythically minimalist future which, for most of us, is unattainable and damn it undesirable.

I am going to encourage you to start where you are: in your messy, complicated, imperfect life. I want to help you see off any lingering feelings of shame or embarrassment that you havent cracked how to do this yet. You are not a slob; you are not lazy; you are not a bad person. You just have too much stuff. Relax. We are going to work through this together.

... because they were in the cellar somewhere and, well, you just didnt want to go down there without a pith helmet and axe