Trading Spaces

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The Morning

Trading Spaces

With spring comes the urge to spring-clean. It’s about so much more than just organizing your closet.

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María-Jesús-Contreras

By

Melissa Kirsch

April 18, 2026,

6:23 a.m. ET

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The best time I ever moved was when I had a cast on my dominant arm. One would think such an impediment would have made the move — midwinter, in an ice storm, in a hurry — onerous, but I sidestepped the hassle by enlisting the movers to pack for me. What would have taken me weeks of “Does this spark joy” and Memory Lane reverie was accomplished in a few hours. Moving is always terrible, even if you aren’t down one paw, but having others dispassionately throw my stuff into boxes spared me both the physical and emotional labor of doing it myself.

It’s spring cleaning time, if you’re the sort to partake of such things. I used to think “spring cleaning” as a concept was some marketer’s gimmick to sell Windex, but the more springs I rack up, the more I understand the urge to dust and scour and air out once the sun’s out all the time, casting its withering gaze on my winter hoard. This year, I’m taking the very good (and new to me) advice of Christina Fallon, a professional organizer. “People get lost in the different chapters of their lives,” Fallon

told The Times

.

Her map to freeing her clients involves acknowledging the emotional freight that objects accumulate. She begins her decluttering in the bathroom, because people are less attached to old bottles of NyQuil than they are more cherished possessions. “Once they get used to saying ‘toss it,’ and they’ve started to build a purging muscle, we move on to harder things,” she said.

For those of us who don’t have the means or the desire to hire an organizer, I think just being aware that deaccession is hard, that our relationships with our things are sometimes more powerful than our desire for an uncluttered dresser, can be helpful. I’ve blamed my own laziness for my apparent inability to get rid of the bag of clothes that has been sitting in my living room for six months. But if I acknowledge I’m also holding onto it because I fear there’s something meaningful in there, I allow a little self-compassion into the equation. Then I can tough-love myself with Fallon’s maxim: “We only use about 20 percent of our wardrobe, so if you haven’t worn or used something within six months, you’re probably not going to use it.” The bag is going to Goodwill this weekend.

“Closets are the heart of the home,” Fallon said. “They show you people’s lives, what they collect and what they’ve shoved in the corners.” There is a closet in my apartment that qualifies as what my editor Tom calls a “

chaos space

.”

I call it “The Id.” It’s so crammed with coats and shoes and tote bags that I have to use the full force of my body to close it. I hadn’t even thought that this was a location I could consider decluttering — it seems like it’s more powerful than I am, like I could move out and the bursting closet would still live there, its contents ready to jump out and scare the next tenant like one of those snake-in-a-can prank toys.

When I think about what would happen if I regained custody of The Id, I feel a dizzying sense of buoyancy, like the first day you go out without a winter parka. What if that mess were gone? What if it was a normal, respectable closet with a normal, respectable number of items in it? I’d be so much lighter! But the reality of totally clearing out the closet seems impossible, too large a task, plus where would all the tote bags go? I like the

advice of another organizer

: Set a timer for 15 minutes and see how much decluttering you can achieve. That’s manageable. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

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