'Hoarders' cleaner on how to avoid keeping too much stuff

When Matt Paxton was 24, his step-dad and two grandfathers died and he had to clean the four houses they owned.

"By the end of that year I was like 'man, this is really hard'. But my grandfather had always said if something is really hard you should do it for a job cause people will pay you to do it. So I just decided to do it."

Paxton is now a cleaning expert who's helped people downsize and declutter for over 20 years. He stars in the TV shows Hoarders and Legacy List and has just released the book Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff.

Even clearing a house after a death can be a positive experience with the right mindset, Paxton tells Jesse Mulligan.

"I get to explore a family's entire legacy, I get to hear generations of stories and I get to do it in a week… at the end of the day, love is at the root of all this stuff so there is joy coming out. It's really how you do it and I know how to do it in a fun, positive way."

Paxton likes getting to the stories of a person's life early so they can be celebrated during the process.

We often have emotions tied up with 'stuff', he says, and he's even come to see hoarding as a demonstration of love or the hunger for it.

"I'll walk into a house and I've got about five, ten minutes to figure out how I need to communicate with this person. Where does the respect need to be directed and where does the compassion need to be directed?"

The word 'hoarder' is overused - only 5 percent of the population are true hoarders, Paxton says.

But it's also true that most of us simply have too much stuff.

When he fell in love a few years ago and had to downsize and move, Paxton was no different.

"I was getting rid of 75 percent of stuff because my new partner is a minimalist and I couldn't bring anything with me except my kids."

After years of helping others downsize, it was "very real" to shed his own stuff and he had to rewrite Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff to reflect his own experience.

Paxton hit a snag when he'd downsized by about 50 percent and shared this challenge with his new partner.

"She says 'well, I live here and if you want to have a happy life here with me you need to get rid of your stuff and come here' otherwise have a great life there with all your stuff."

Among the objects, Paxton found while clearing up was a taped-up box on which he'd written 'Fragile'.

Inside, wrapped in layers of newspaper and bubble wrap, was a single wooden stick with some knicks in it.

"I kept looking at it and [a bit later] was like 'oh my god, my dad and I did this when we were camping'.

Although it had obviously seemed very precious at the time, Paxton was happy to photograph the stick and throw it away. 

It didn't make his 'Legacy List' - a list he suggests people make of 5 or 6 precious items that tell their family's story and their own story.

Paxton's own list includes a $5 poker chip from his previous life as a 23-year-old gambling addict in Nevada.

After spending all night at a casino, Paxton had only one $5 chip to his name and couldn't afford a taxi home.

Bust just after he'd started the five-mile walk, a taxi driver stopped and said 'get in the car'.

"He drove me home for free and said 'you gotta stop gambling, you gotta get your life together."

After that day, Paxton never gambled again.

The work he does now has compassion at its heart, he says.

"I failed a lot early on in life and a lot of people helped so I've got a lot of compassion… really that's all you need to clean the extreme hoarders [homes] is a lot of compassion."

Female partners who are too frequently left with the task of trying to manage male clutter can, understandably, run short of compassion, Paxton says.

When trying to help a loved one declutter, it's important to be patient and positive, he says.

Start by together tackling a small area in a small amount of time - even for ten minutes a night - and be positive way about what did get done rather than focusing on what's left to do.

"If you can do that for a week that starts to let them know it's not that bad."

A lot of the decluttering advice in Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff is about encouraging people to simply keep going with the process.

"Once you get two days into it then you start to see the empty space and you start to care and get excited…"

To date, Paxton says that none of his clients has regretted giving up a household item he's encouraged them to shed.