A messy single mum whose house looked like 'it had been burgled' after her marriage broke down now helps others clear their cluttered homes and overcome their hoarding habits.
Janine McDonald was always neat and tidy until the breakdown of her marriage, post-natal depression and the looming threat of redundancy took a toll on her mental health.
The 52-year-old was constantly trying to keep on top of the mess at her house in Salford, but said she always found an excuse to put it off - leaving it cluttered with everything from clothes that needed putting away to children’s toys and paperwork.
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As her home grew steadily messier, Janine began to see the impact it was having on her mental health and decided to act.
“My house looked like I’d been burgled,” she said. “There was stuff on every single surface. I knew things had to change so I started saying to myself ‘just do three things every time I went into a room’.
“I’d choose three things - pick them up, tidy them away, throw them away, or give them away.
“It helped tremendously and wasn’t overwhelming. After not very long I was finding that in every room I went into you could see the progress which was really heartening.”
Janine was made redundant from her job as a corporate manager, leaving the single mother-of-two to live on her £800 monthly Universal Credit payments.
Knowing she was unlikely to find this in the corporate world, Janine decided to inquire at the Job Centre about setting up her own business.
Just a fortnight before the first lockdown in 2020, she started 'Clear the Clutter Now' which has gone on to help scores of people to overcome their messy habits.
Janine uses her first-hand experience of clearing clutter to empathise with her clients and help them to overcome their issues. She has worked with several extreme hoarders to tidy their messy homes.
“There was one client that you couldn’t get from the kitchen into the lounge and you had to go out of the back door,” she said.
“They have everything - a lot of it was clothes, DVDs and broken things they hadn’t thrown away. A lot of hoarding is psychological or from physical trauma and that can go back to being a very young child.
“People with neuro diversities struggle with organisation and procrastination. What I’ve found is that people with ADHD traits are finding me to help support them. I do it online and in person - depending on where they live.
“I get to know them and get to know the journey that they have had and talk to them about how they would like their home to feel, and how they would like their homes to be. I ask them what they enjoy doing and then we can work out where those things are best put.
“I’m very very hands-on. I sort out the doom bags (bags filled with items that either haven’t been thrown away or given to charity)”.
“If there’s rubbish around we will get it in the bin, if stuff can be recycled then I’ll do that. It’s not about buying more storage, it’s about looking at what they have. Storage solutions are the last thing you look at.
“I share my journey with them too and they can see that I understand how they’ve got themselves into this situation. There’s no judgement - I’m very reassuring.
“They’ve already done the hardest thing in reaching out to me. So I say ‘now I’m by your side and we’re doing it together’.”
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