Stacey Solomon, Eat Your Heart Out!

 

To be fair, I have not watched more than about one-and-a-half of these programmes. Dear Stacey goes to help people living in overcrowded chaos to minimalise their possessions, and get everything organised. All the while she is relentlessly cheerful [except when consoling people as they part with emotional items] Her decluttering technique is quite a common one - empty everything out. sort it into categories, then dispose of items which are duplicated, dated, damaged or despised. Sounds good in principle, but I get hot under the collar when this reduction includes getting rid of books or haberdashery.

SS herself lives in a massive Tudor style mansion costin £1.2M which she calls "Pickle Cottage". So she has loads of rooms to play around with. Anyway, back to my decluttering. 

Cornerstones' original garage is a small, damp brick built, flat roofed building. And since 2009 we have been filling it up with more and more stuff. Bicycles, gardening equipment, outdoor toys, painting and decorating supplies etc. Plus old freezer and even older tumble dryer. I said "If we have a dry sunny day, I will empty it all out and tidy it up." Not least because all my flower pots were at the end behind three bikes, and I could not get to them. I have no idea how many I have, nor yet what sizes. Here are the before shots

As you enter, the frudge and dryer are immediately inside the door. The bench is stacked high with gardening stuff, and you cannot reach the green drawer unit because there is a lawnmower, dustbin full of compost and sack barrow in the way. Then on one side shelves crammed with paint, toys, tools, a gas heater, whilst the opposite wall has a hanging rack full of tools 

and the central space is packed with bikes, and bits of wood etc. There is no room to swing a small felt mouse, let alone a cat. We have bizarre things like huge rolls of foil, a large bag of microphone stands -  and a pair of coffin trestles. I am not sure why Bob rescued them from a church decluttering day...

Everything went outside in vague "Categories" . The wheeled stuff included bikes, lawnmower, 2 sack barrows[flatbed and sacktruck] 2 pressure washers, shredder, shopping trolley, toddler vehicle, trolley jack...

Cans and boxes, trugs and bags, the gas heater, and my sign from a skip. And a heavy box - not unpacked since Easter 2021. Why do you have so many vices? I asked him...and the blue thing that holds the drill to the bench...

I put paints and chemicals under the windows in the shade and Bob came and sorted them out, I found a strange thing that looked like part of the Starship enterprise [it is the heavy base of a stand for holding things up when you are working on them]

And Liz's 1982 nappy bucket, now totally full of funnels in all sizes!

And a mysterious jar of green liquid which is definitely not  seafood sauce.

But I ran out of time, the items were put back neatly, but the bench is still stacked with my garden stuff and unsorted flowerpots. That's for another day. But lots of junk went into the bin, and I was able to repurpose my tall flower arranging buckets to store garden canes, brooms and 'spare broom handles' very neatly.

Now one bike is hanging up at the end by the door [which cannot be opened due to the sandbags on the other side] But in the space behind it, the coffin trestles have provided an excellent stand for the mic-stand case to rest horizontally, no longer in danger if getting a soggy bottom from a damp floor.

Tools hang neatly, brushes are supported in tall buckets. The mower is parked sideways and takes up less room.

You can see the clear space around the bicycles.

All is good, and we are happier. 

I am still wondering what the green stuff in the seafood sauce jar is though...

And I never realised I had so many of those blue stacking Sainsbury boxes from 1998...