That first day was the worst. My wife was in bed, heavily under the weather from the morning sickness for which I apologised that morning as I did every morning, while delivering to her the Marmite and avocado on toast that was her remorseless breakfast.
She eventually got out of bed about 10 or 11 and lolled about in a terrible state. In the hour or two between my lifting that first piece of stuff and her rising, I moved some paper around the table, sighed heavily and regularly and changed two nappies.
I suggested this clear out and Zanna vehemently opposed it because it was not a physical possibility in a household like ours at a time like this. I sort of shrugged, knowing I had no argument, knowing she was right. But this was not a time for argument; it was a time for action.
•
There's a concept in the corporate world called "getting buy-in", which means convincing someone to do something they have no interest in. I was not so crass and corporate as to try to get buy-in from Zanna. Also, I knew I wouldn't be able to.
But the bonds of love are heavy and burdensome and it didn't come as a total surprise on the second day of the clear-out when I found her standing in front of the heaving wardrobe of our daughter's bedroom with a black polythene garden sack and a furrowed brow.
It was about 8.30am. It was doubtful I had ever loved her more.
We put our daughter in her cot, filled it with toys and laid down an assault on that wardrobe that made me proud to be part of my marriage. That wardrobe had become the nexus of disorganisation in our home, the place unwanted objects went to be piled upon other unwanted objects, unto the ceiling.
At the wardrobe's emotional centre was my snowboard bag, a hangover from a time before I met my wife when I was trying to be someone I wasn't, in the hope I would meet someone unlike me. I bought the snowboard with the stated intention of becoming one of New Zealand's top 1000 snowboarders. I took the snowboard to the mountain exactly seven times.
"Are you going to get rid of the snowboard?" Zanna asked.
"Yes," I told her, running my hand across the camo pattern of the bag, with its cargo of high-end accoutrements, remembering the hopeless promise of that time and the massive expense of it all. Instead of taking it out of the wardrobe, I made sure Zanna wasn't looking and pushed it deep into the corner.
•
"Zanna!" I would call out, almost every time I picked something up - it is little exaggeration to say I did not recognise a single object in our house - "Do you know what this is?"
With the patience of a wife who is coming to grips with the relationship she has chosen, she would tell me. She always knew, no matter how oddly shaped or pointless the object.
I tested our relationship during those humid days of our summer clear-out, and our relationship was not once found wanting, not from my end.
Not to get all existential or anything, but I got to thinking about the nature of time. I couldn't get out of my head those big clean-ups done in movies and television purely through the power of musical montage and/or time-lapse photography.
It's funny, because that's how our own clear-out looks to me in retrospect - drained of the tedium and drudgery that was its biggest component and remaining as only a few flashes of thrilling big-ticket throw-aways and some nagging back pain.
I knew the most difficult time would be during the deep search through the plenitude of shopping bags and brown boxes containing decades of photos, old school books and diaries.
I was a happy child and a deeply emotionally troubled young man. The years of accumulated tumult engulfed me as I riffled through papers and pictures but there was no time to process it because there were bags of rubbish waiting to be filled.
There was one photo of me, aged 21 or 22, sitting at an outdoor table in my mum's garden with her and my uncles and aunties, smiling, trying so hard to look relaxed and adult in spite of my desperate discomfort, trying to be the person I thought they all expected me to be and having no idea how to do that.
I opened my first diary, written around the same time, the opening page of which I see every few years, so its few lines are not unfamiliar but its embarrassing attempt at poetry still hits me like a shock every time.
"There are no people only pain," it reads. "Thoughts are like water, crazy insane." I think I had just broken up with my first girlfriend, but that doesn't excuse that kind of stupidity or that sad, sad rhyme. Not even water's harshest critic would claim it was insane.
Who did I think I was? There is nothing in the world I am more embarrassed about than those two sentences, but there's a lot in my diaries that comes close.
I guess I was a young man trying to discover who I was, or to invent it, and I'm still doing that and imagine I always will. I don't want to forget that person or lose the record of who he was, but I don't want him taking up space in my house, either.
Nothing gave me more satisfaction than consolidating those diaries and photographs into a plastic 90-litre box and stacking it in my garage.
•
In bed after that second day, Zanna and I had a long discussion about the nature of our clear-out and what we were trying to achieve. We didn't reach any resolution that I can recall, so it was probably more a conversation about the fact we needed to have the conversation.
I said I thought the key to a good clear out was thinking about how to do it ahead of time. I think I meant, "Where do we want everything to go?" or "What do we want our house to look like?"
This sounded good to me at the time but, as I reflect on it, it makes no sense, because I want my house to be empty. I want a plain white house containing one bed, two cots, one couch, one TV, two computers and one bookcase. I could be argued into a chest of drawers, but not easily. I can hardly imagine a joy comparable to that this fantasy brings me.
Over the following couple of days, I stopped asking Zanna what things were, and just expressed my true desire in the question: "Can I throw this?" When I had worn that question smooth, I adopted the abbreviation "Throw?" and then the more assertive: "I'm throwing this, okay?"
The phrasing didn't matter much because Zanna usually said no. Not because she is a hoarder but because the deeper into it we got, the stronger the pull of extreme minimalism became on me and the more irrational became my desire to dispose.
I tried to throw out our measuring spoons, for instance, because they were no longer tied together properly. Physically, their removal from our lives would not free up much space, and it would cause major scone-based problems in the future, but psychologically, the attraction of seeing them in a black rubbish sack was almost overwhelming.
For years, I've used a three-pile system for tidying: One pile for rubbish, one for filing and one for putting away. I devised it as a teenager and have always been quite proud of it. I recently told a book editor friend about it, suggesting there might be a self-help book in it because it promised a better life in three easy steps and was thus quite marketable. The title was to be Three Pile Style.
"That's not a book," he told me quite harshly. "It's not even a tweet." I took his advice on board and put the idea in the filing pile.
It turns out three piles is way too few. We had at least three different rubbish piles alone: for the Sallies, the tip, the electronic recycling depot.
On top of that, we had a table of stuff to sell or take back to the people we had stolen it from, although we knew most of it would end up in a rubbish sack, because clearing out a house is hard enough.
As we whittled those piles away - as the bags disappeared, as we drove to the Sallies and the recycling depot, as I tipped bags into our wheelie bin and those of our neighbours - what I felt most was a lightness, a kind of deep and slow-burning pleasure I knew would stay with me for a while.
It was nice.
But our house is not yet empty, not even close and nor, I assume will it ever be, because I have come to understand life is a slow and pitiless accumulation of things that weigh you down.
That's not to be negative about those things because they are necessary aerodynamic resistance on our race towards a happy death.
Without their heaviness, we could so easily arrive on this Earth and float straight back out into the eternal never.
I am thinking here not just of junk, but also of the people in our lives, who are usually a different thing.
I have one child and another on the way. I love them both equally, as I understand to be demanded of a parent. I love the one that is already here in a much more time-consuming way, with Weet-Bix and nappy changes and endless night-time wakings, and those practical ways are more demanding than I could ever have imagined. And those demands are about to double.
Sometimes, the weight seems overwhelming, but in those moments, I remind myself that emptiness also has its own weight.
I don't miss that weight but if I ever do, I know I can find it in a clear plastic 90l box in my garage.
Paid help for hoarders
Time-poor young professionals and busy mums are among hundreds of Kiwis paying top dollar to clear the clutter from their lives.
Professional organisers are big business in the Netherlands and the US but are in their infancy here.
Auckland-based organiser Michelle Denholm started Harmonious Living two years ago and estimates most of her clients are women between 35-55.
"People just want help. We've got so much stuff in our lives nowadays and we keep buying more," says Denholm.
"If you're going to buy more, look at releasing something otherwise your house is going to burst at the seams."
Denholm charges $750 over two days where she helps people sort through their clutter.
During the process, she will ask clients why they're holding on to items.
"I've dealt with a couple of chronic hoarders. It's an emotional process and it's tough for them but once they've called me it's because they want to make changes and they're ready," she says.
Raewyn Gallagher has been operating Sort Divas for a year and says she has "lost count" of how many people have called for help.
She estimates about 60 per cent of her clients are aged 30-40.
Gallagher often comes across men who hold on to items thinking they will come in handy one day.
"It's usually electrical items and those sorts of things or the odd pair of old golf clubs that still has their favourite putter in, so they'll keep that as well as the new set," she says.
Gallagher doesn't take a "free range" approach in clearing people's homes.
Instead, she uses brightly coloured bins to sort what she considers is rubbish, what could go to charity and what should be sold.
"If they don't want to part with something, that's their choice. You wouldn't want anyone to feel aggrieved," she says.
"But most are ready to do it because they've gone through the emotional choice before they've rung us or sometimes it's because it's the death of a partner and they're ready to part with things they no longer require."
- Amy Maas
