Source : the age
February 18, 2026 — 3:25pm
Scroll through social media and you’ll find “expert organisers” showing off pantries that look more like film sets than food storage. Perfectly arranged, beautifully lit, colour coded and containerised. Highly stylised spaces where actual signs of life are prohibited.
Containers are “faced” – brought to the front edge of the shelf – wasting the vast majority of the storage space behind. It looks good, but who has the luxury to waste space like that?As a professional organiser, I want to scream. With almost 25 years’ experience, I can tell you, this fakery helps nobody.
These pretend pantries never feature an open packet held closed with a clothes peg. No half-empty jars of peanut butter. No loaf of last week’s bread sitting messily next to the dog’s medication. Let’s be honest, a real pantry is often also the home of random paperwork, medication, batteries (are they fresh or dead – who knows?), sticky tape, light globes, and an excessive number of cookbooks from 1995 and beyond.
For most of us peace-seekers and chaos-avoiders, we just want things to function. We’ve got better things to do than fuss with a label maker.
Yes, those clear acrylic containers so popular on social media can be useful. Matchy-matchy is good too – repetition is easy on the eye and the brain. But more plastic containers do not equal decluttering. It’s the same for those of you using mason jars in the fridge, lined up looking all ROYGBIV, and Pinterest-perfect. Your pretty pictures don’t fool me.
It’s a set-up. It’s clickbait. It preaches an unattainable perfection that leaves many feeling bad about the state of their fridge, their pantry, their skill set and their capacity to make anything look attractive in an already busy, complicated life. I love the “pretty end” too. But this fantasy imagery deludes, intimidates and betrays the reality of the process.
Staged socials give my role a bad name. They sell an illusion, and people pay for it with shame or guilt.
One of my biggest pet peeves with this fakery is the overuse of clear containers with labels. Sure, label plain flour to separate it from your self-raising flour. But do you need to put labels on everything? Can you really not tell your cornflakes from your cous cous? Your rice from your Ryvitas?
And don’t try to pretend that you’ve done it all in record time. Those cute images on Instagram don’t show you how long it really takes; your fridge and freezer will likely take half a day or more. A pantry another full day if it’s a walk in.
Decluttering is ugly. It’s dirty. It’s messy. The result is always better but it’s rarely finished, final or photo-shoot worthy. For many, it’s genuinely hard. This is why I have a 25-year career helping people all over Australia using the organising and decluttering superpowers that I’ve had since kindergarten. At kindy, I graded all the coloured blocks… by size, by colour, by shape. I then looked up, I’m told, and said, “What next?”
I can organise conferences, parties, words, time, space, thoughts; you name it. I didn’t know organising was a skill until I was well into my 30s. I thought everyone could do it! How did I start as an organiser? I simply wanted to do what I loved: the hands-on sorting out, creating order from disorder.
My job isn’t rocket surgery, and to some sceptics, it’s a joke. But for most of my clients, overwhelm is real, and someone to lead, strategically guide and teach them is a godsend.
Everyone needs decluttering, even me. Summer is a great time to tackle the kitchen, and in particular, the fridge and freezer. Overwhelmed at the thought? Your spices are a great place to warm up your decision-making skills. Most of us are guilty of having herbs and spices direct from the dark ages. A game I play: what’s the oldest used-by date in a pantry or fridge/freezer I can find when decluttering? The freezer is a tomb, the fridge a mortuary. The spice rack a mausoleum.
At one regional Victorian home, I discovered some thyme from 1981. It’s thyme to go!
Foodstuffs are the most neglected category. When you move on, and a family member or someone like me has to come and clean out your house, I’d love it if everything in your pantry was in date, and I could distribute foods to communities in need. But the vast majority has been opened or is out of date, or has spoiled, or so obscure it was never used in the first place.
Why is your pantry and freezer so full? Do you live more than an hour from the supermarket? Where are the declutter stories on socials about a deep dive into a clogged freezer? That’s a far more realistic problem. One deceased estate I worked on had a box freezer layered like a geological strata – each layer revealing an earlier decade… at the bottom were meat and ice creams from 1998. That little hard-working box deserved a break, and a defrost. Decluttering your freezer is a breeze. If an item isn’t labelled, say bye!
Fridges need air to be able to circulate to operate at their best. Never have your fridge more than 80 per cent full. It also makes putting away groceries far less painful. Anything pushed to the back or bottom is likely clutter. Work on one area at a time. Focus on functionality. Form can come later… or not at all.
You can’t declutter once. It’s like doing pilates or practicing guitar … it requires regular effort. And it does not need to result in colour-coded, uniform, perfection. Function beats fantasy. Every time.
Lissanne Oliver is a writer and professional declutterer specialising in downsizing and estate clearance.
Lissanne Oliver is a writer and professional declutterer specialising in downsizing and estate clearance.
