After four years of what I will choose to call gentle encouragement (but which my husband would no doubt refer to as nagging), we finally started to clear some of the mess from our garage recently. My husband has maintained over this time that there was no need to do anything, but to my mind if you have a double garage that never has a car in it and barely has enough floor space to walk from the internal access door to the garage door, then there is probably some room for improvement.

There isn’t really that much ‘stuff’ in the garage. The problem is that there are no shelves for storage so it is almost impossible to stack things out of the way. The Shelves v No Shelves debate has been the sticking point for our discussions about the garage for some time.

Some of my son's stash of gears, mechanisms and broken video recorders

Once we started cleaning, it did become apparent that there were quite a few items that we could part with – empty boxes from appliances and blown light globes for a start plus two air mattresses that belong to someone else from a kids camp a year ago, a small bag of broken golf tees that belonged to my Great Uncle and brown paper off-cuts from my older son’s kite making project last year. Bit of a no-brainer about whether we really need to keep any of those.

While most of the clutter, both useful and useless, belongs to my husband, the rest of the family has ‘stuff’ hiding out in the shed too, like the stash of broken video recorders and DVD players for my 7-year-old to dismantle (six is enough to be considered a stash, right?).

I’ve got a few things in the garage as well, but it was one particular discovery that got me thinking about the things we hold onto for sentimental reasons. I’m guilty of this at times, although my clutter is generally more of the ‘well you never know, this could be useful one day’ variety. Sentimentality obviously plays a part occasionally though, as I found this in the garage:

This bag once held something that I bought while at the 1990 Llangollen International Eisteddfod in Wales.

That’s right. I have a 21-year-old plastic bag. It’s a Welsh plastic bag, but I’m pretty sure that Adele Blair, the professional organiser who is helping me to bring my chaotic life under control, would choose to emphasise the ‘plastic bag’ part of the description.

Adele suggested I photograph the bag, since it obviously triggers some significant memories for me, and that I then let it go. I don’t need it, it isn’t adding anything positive to my life and it is adding to the general clutter that I need to bring under control. So, photos have been taken (obviously) and the bag has been disposed of.

Do you hold on to things for sentimental reasons? I’m not talking about photos or items that are actually useful. Do you hold on to things like concert tickets and programs or other mementoes that you have collected at events, on holidays or at other special occasions? If you do, how do you store them to make sure that they don’t become clutter? I think it’s great that digital photography now gives us a very inexpensive means of holding on to the memories without keeping the clutter. What do you think?