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Part 2: Making Space to Make Space

Part 2: Making Space to Make Space
7–11 minutes

Approx Reading Time

Overview

In Part 1 of the series I outlined the project plan, the aims, and how we’ll measure success. I also identified the first hurdle in commencing with Operation Bedroom: where do I store all of the stuff after completing the first phase of the plan? This is where preparing for the project comes in; I need to make room in the attic space outside our bedroom so that I can declutter the bedroom without hitting massive roadblocks. This feels like a huge, daunting task in itself but I’m hoping that breaking it down into stages will help me feel less overwhelmed.

This post is going to focus on the precursory step to completing Operation Bedroom. This is a scary one because I’m laying it bare here and being completely vulnerable. I’m going to be including pictures of the attic space before and after sorting it out. I have a lot of shame attached to the mess and clutter in my home. I often feel like a lazy failure, and sharing my failures in a public space – and opening myself up to scrutiny – is a rather daunting prospect. I also know that it has the potential to provide reassurance and inspiration to other people like me, so I’m going to keep focused on that. Anyway, welcome to Part 2 of the series; making space to make space.

Getting Started

Starting a decluttering project can honestly be so hard. Identifying where to start is half the battle. As the great Julie Andrews once said “let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start”. Cool, thanks Julie, but where the fuck is the beginning!? When you have years and years of clutter piling up, there’s no easily identifiable start and end, it all just kind of feeds into itself. Which, of course, absolutely kills my motivation. And motivation is such a bitch. I don’t know about you, but I tend to sit around and wait for that ‘burst’ of motivation to come, and then try and get everything sorted while the short burst lasts. The really annoying thing is that motivation begets motivation; it doesn’t just come naturally, it comes from actually starting.

So, how do we start when we have no motivation? My advice, look for the ‘quick wins’ and start there. These are tasks that take a small amount of effort, can be completed quickly, and visually make a difference. The quick wins for tidying up the attic space outside of my bedroom include:

  • Moving things that are in the way to another part of the room (literally about 1 minute)
  • Dismantling my son’s newborn crib (approx 5 minutes)
  • Getting my son’s old clothes downstairs and into the dining room (approx 5 minutes)
  • Putting things back in a way that takes up way less room (a couple of minutes maybe?)

Completing the above tasks collectively took about 15 minutes tops. And took the space from this…

…to this. 15 minutes! 🙌🏻

*It wasn’t actually one 15 minute stint though, I’ll expand on this further down.

But, of course, we’ve hit our first major bump in the road. Usually this would seriously demotivate me, but I’m having a motivated day (maybe it’s because it’s bank holiday Monday), so I’m powering through! The issue? I discovered that my cat peed on some of the clothes I wanted to get sorted today. You can read more about that in a field note from this phase here: Field Note.

Moving on from the Disaster

I had planned to move all of my son’s old clothes downstairs, sort this according to their size, and then pop them in vacuum bags. But thanks to my idiot ginger cat, Kenneth, I now also have a mountain of laundry to do. Luckily (kind of) for me, he’d chosen to pee in a couple of bags of clothes, and everything else was completely untouched. This could have been much worse and completely stalled any progress, because I could have had to wash everything. But thankfully, I just have a small mountain of laundry to do, and not a mountain the size of Everest. So while those bags of clothes are washing, I’m cracking on with sorting the clothes that don’t need washing.

Disclaimer side note: All of the clothes we vacuum pack will be washed again in the future when they get unpacked. If we do decide to have another baby and need to use the clothes, we will be washing them. And if we decide to donate them, we will be washing them.

Sorting and Bagging the Clothes

After getting our son’s old clothes downstairs, my husband and I collectively spent roughly 30 minutes sorting through them and getting them bagged up (the ones that didn’t need to be washed). There was a bit of stop/start while we completed the task – I needed to eat some lunch and our son woke up about 45 minutes into his nap. I managed to settle him back to sleep so we were able to carry on with the sorting.

The clothes that needed washing were still going through the laundry process when we’d finished sorting through the clothes that didn’t need washing. Going through those clothes wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. We put a documentary on to watch while we were sorting, and between the two of us, we got through it pretty quickly.

During the process, we put clothes we no longer wanted to one side (we’ll be donating them to charity) and sorted what we’re keeping into age groups: newborn/up to 1 month/up to 3 months, 3-6 months, 6-9 months, and 9-12 months. We then put them into a vacuum bag in age order, oldest at the back and youngest at the front. Most of the stuff fit into one vacuum bag, and we’re probably going to need two more to get everything else put away.

Our son woke up from his nap not long after we finished sorting through the first lot of clothes, so we needed to press pause on this task. This is one of the challenges with doing projects while parenting; starting the task sparked motivation in me and I didn’t want to stop 😂 But that’s just how it goes, and it’s one of the reasons I’m trying to not put too much pressure on myself. When our son woke up, we decided to make the most of the bank holiday Monday and headed out for the rest of the afternoon to enjoy some family time together. There was a new film on Netflix that my husband and I wanted to watch together, so we planned to sort through and vacuum pack the clothes that went through the laundry that day after our son went to bed, while watching the film.

Resuming After a Break

Okay, no bullshit here. Getting back into this part of the sorting after we had a break was really challenging. After our son went to bed for the night, we did sort out some of his clothes while watching the film, so a big part of the task was finished, hooray! We still had some clothes left that we needed to sort through, but we actually managed to get it finished the next day. Which, again, is a huge win for me. Normally, I’d leave it for an embarrassing amount of time before I found the motivation to get going again and finish the task. But we finished it the following day, and all of our son’s old clothes were sorted. In total, I’d estimate we probably spent about 1.5 hours (maximum) sorting through all of the clothes and getting them put away in vacuum bags.

Remember above when I said that we didn’t tidy the attic space in one 15 minute stint? Yeah… About that 😂 On the day we started clearing the attic space out, I did basically everything but dismantle the newborn crib. All we had left to do was dismantle that, and arrange the stuff left in that space to ensure there is room to store the stuff from our bedroom. How long do you think it took me to get back to it and complete that (literally 5 minute) task?

TWO WEEKS. Two fucking weeks it took me to get back to it and finish that one thing. Why am I like this!? 😂 I felt so anxious for that entire two weeks. I knew it was only a 5 minute job, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Why? I have no idea! But we eventually got to it, and I felt so much better once we’d done it.

Summary

Even though we had the little stumble of having an unnecessarily long break in the middle of making room in the attic space, we got it finished. And the actual hands on work in the attic only took about 15 minutes to complete, with the clothes taking around 1.5 hours (minus the laundry time) to finish. I think this blog post really demonstrates why I have given myself about 4 months to complete Operation Bedroom from start to finish.

I’m not the kind of person that can work non-stop for 12 hours and finish Operation Bedroom, nor do I have a lifestyle that allows for this kind of approach to decluttering. And that’s okay. Yes, I could beat myself up for ‘being lazy’ when I spent 2 weeks ignoring the task I’d started but hadn’t finished. But it is super important for me to have days where I can switch my brain off and relax. I have a full-time job, a PhD, a one-year-old, and general life to maintain, it’s okay that I allow myself some downtime every now and again.

So, if you take anything from this post, please take this with you: taking a break from an overwhelming task is okay. You’re not shit. You’re not lazy. You’re a human being that needs a break sometimes. And hopefully, my being upfront and transparent about the fact that less than 2 hours of work took 2 weeks to complete offers you some reassurance. You don’t have to be a decluttering master. You don’t have to be hyper-organised and amazing. You can be a chaotic goblin and still finish what you set out to do. You’ve got this!

And now that I have ‘made space for making space’, I can finally get started on the actual task of Operation Bedroom!

See you in Phase 1 x

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