When Suzy Walker downsized and had to perform a rigorous and necessary declutter, she was amazed to find ample room for what really matters – and an inspiring new vision for her future

Suzy Walker

Last summer, I scaled down from a roomy three-bedroom cottage in Sussex, with a garden and shed, to a 46-foot by six-foot canal boat in a London dock. My son had just finished his GCSEs and had been ofered a place at a sixth form in the city that specialised in his passion, film. From our Sussex home, it would have meant an exhausting four-hour daily commute for him. I am a single parent, my son is the most important person in my life and I wanted to support him. I also realised that I only had a couple of years left before he moves out, and I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible before he flies the nest.

The only way I could aford to move back to London, where the rents are sky-high, was to rent out my cottage and move onto a boat in King’s Cross. I had to rent out my house unfurnished, which was the opportunity to have an epic declutter to avoid paying a fortune for storage space. I’ve always been fascinated by documentaries about the tiny house movement – people living in shipping containers and cabins – and had flirted with minimalism for years, but I always felt too messy and disorganised to follow through.

Little did I know that my decluttering plans would require me to dig deep, into way more than the back of the cupboard under the stairs, and embark on a self-development journey that has been profound and life-changing. It has changed my view of the world.

Lessons I learned when I made space for them

FORGIVE YOURSELF

As I started to make an inventory of what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to discard, I felt a huge sense of shame and failure. I’ve always tried to be eco-conscious, am conscientious about self-development and enthusiastic about creative projects. As I lined up knitting needles, balls of wool and spiralisers, and tripped over unread self-help books that teetered in piles around my bed, I was struck by how much energy, time and money I’d wasted.