Lockdown nesting has created clutter in every corner of my house – it’s time to clear it out and move on

A storage unit, along with a local lockup garage full of furniture and flotsam left from a previous house, are two of my dirty secrets, writes Jenny Eclair

Once every couple of years this lockup ‘gets sorted’ but between sort-outs the stuff builds up again (Getty/iStock)

I saw a woman cross the street from a hardware shop carrying a new broom the other day, and I was suddenly seized by the desire to get home and clear everything out.

Lockdown nesting has created clutter in every corner of our house. There is only one room on the top floor which has recently been converted from chaos into a new oasis of calm. This is our daughter’s old teenage bedroom which has finally undergone the transformation from a millennial den to spare room, complete with a new bed, new sheets and absolutely nothing to trip over.

For years, this room had clung to its blu-tacked posters and assortment of kitsch knick-knacks, long after the girl had set up her own nest elsewhere. Unfortunately, this nest turned out to be a one-bedroom flat shared with her boyfriend where there was no space for 50 Barbies and a vintage collection of Polly Pockets (surely worth a fortune).

Inevitably, everything from her childhood to her early twenties remained archived at our place, until just before Christmas, when we mustered the strength to get rid of it all.

Only we didn’t get rid of it all – we took the ultimate coward’s way out and shoved a load of it into a storage unit. For some reason, I could not contemplate putting her A-level art coursework on a bonfire. As for the teddies, bought decades ago, when I was away from home and feeling guilty for being a neglectful mother, they still looked at me with the same “your child used to weep into my fur” eyes and I couldn’t get rid of them.

This storage unit and a local lockup garage full of furniture and flotsam left from a previous house are two of our dirty secrets. This is what people who cannot face making ruthless decisions do – they shove the problem out of sight and bankrupt themselves in the process. “It’s only temporary,” we promise ourselves. We have had the lockup garage for 15 years, though to be fair, as a designer my partner has used it for other people’s house projects, so it’s not just our crap in there.

Once every couple of years, this lockup “gets sorted”, but between sort-outs, the stuff builds up again and eventually, because we cannot reach the Christmas tree stand at the back of the garage, we buy a new one. And so it goes on.

Compared to a lot of people, on the surface, we live a vaguely streamlined existence. Ours is a compact modern house with no cellars or attic spaces. It doesn’t ramble, there are no outbuildings, we don’t have land, and we aren’t the kind of people you see on TV’s Salvage Hunters, who venture into an old barn somewhere round the back of the house, only to discover that there’s a completely forgotten haywagon and a 1960s Riley Elf tucked under some grubby old tarpaulin. That said, I have a horrible feeling there might be three broken vacuum cleaners taking up valuable space in that wretched lockup.

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Our extra storage space must be paid for, which is a waste of money, so this is the year I have vowed to scale everything down. After all, we’re at an age when downsizing is something some of our contemporaries are contemplating.

Most of us will have visited older relatives who lived in pristine bungalows back in the day, places where cupboards revealed nothing but empty suitcases ready to be packed and maybe a spare hairdryer. My own parents didn’t quite manage to pull this off and my mother’s place still has far too much lidless Tupperware containers and other assorted junk, crammed into a cupboard. Maybe hoarding is genetic?

The main problem is that we all have so much more stuff than we used to. When I was a teenager, I had a single wardrobe and chest of drawers that all my clothes fit in with ease. I had a china pony and a lava lamp on the bedside table and that was it. Life was simple.

Nowadays, I need something the size of a dining room table just to house my daily meds and midlife crisis hobbies. Painting supplies, jigsaws and embroidery teeter in Tower of Pisa-style piles in every corner. I’ve kept every notebook since I first started doing stand-up. Why? Just in case I fancy doing a set written in 1994, I suppose.

Sometimes when I need to feel calm, I go up to the newly refurbished top floor and drink in the clean space. Then I think about the bulging bin liners and packing cases in the storage unit, and I feel a bit sick again. “In the summer”, I decide. “We’ll sort it all out in the summer.”