Most of what people carry isn’t on any list. It’s the appointment nobody else remembers, the cupboard you shut quickly, the form that has been in your bag for a fortnight. We help with the part you can see, and with the part you can’t.
We met at work, became friends, and then became the sort of friends who finish each other’s to-do lists. Somewhere along the way we worked out that the thing we liked most about our jobs was helping other people get on top of theirs — so we started Life Laundry and did it properly.
We have both worked for ourselves for years, so we know what it is to juggle the work, the house, the admin and everyone else’s needs at the same time. Between us we have a fairly wide set of skills, and we are not precious about which one we use. If the thing that would help most is a garage, we’ll do the garage. If it is a month of unopened post, we’ll do that instead.
Life Laundry was Jane’s idea long before it was a business. She had turned it over for years — the sense that people were carrying far more than their houses, and that somebody ought to help with both. It stayed an idea, the way good ideas do when you are busy being useful to everyone else.
What changed was having someone to build it with. Some things you will happily do on your own and some you only ever start once there are two of you, and this turned out to be the second kind. Which is, more or less, the whole point of what we do.
Clutter is rarely only about stuff. It’s about the decisions attached to it — what to keep, what it cost, who gave it to you, what it says about you — and those decisions are exhausting to make alone. Most people don’t need telling how to tidy. They need someone alongside them so the deciding stops being the hard part.
The same is true of everything else being held in your head at once. A room can be sorted in a day. The load underneath it is what comes back.
And it is not only houses. An inbox nobody has opened in three weeks, invoices that never quite go out, a filing system that exists in one person’s head — it is the same problem wearing different clothes, and it is just as heavy.
People in the middle of something. A house move, a new baby, a bereavement, a separation, a job that has taken over. People who have looked at the same room for a year. People who are managing fine and would just rather not be doing it on their own.
Small business owners and the self-employed, too. We do the back-office work that keeps getting pushed to Sunday night — inboxes, invoicing, filing, and the simple systems that stop it piling up again. Either now and then when it has got away from you, or every month so it never does.
There is no judgement in any of it. We have seen every kind of house and every kind of inbox, and we are not here to be impressed or appalled by yours.
All over the country. We are based around Leeds, Wakefield and Selby, so West Yorkshire is home ground — but a good part of our work is further afield, and we plan for it rather than squeeze it in. Distance is a logistics question, not a reason to say no.
So wherever you are, tell us what you are dealing with and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
Two things. We work with you rather than around you — nothing leaves your house without you saying so, and we would rather take longer than have you regret something by Friday.
And we’re building an app, coming soon. It will be free to use, with some optional extras, whether you ever book us or not. It exists because the thinking is the heavy part, and that is true whether or not you can afford a decluttering service.