If you’ve come across Stacey Solomon’s new BBC show Sort Your Life Outyou will already be privileged enough to know that it’s the safest space on TV. Here, the former X Factor star turned Instagram influencer and life hack merchant, is gently telling the people of the United Kingdom that, respectfully, they need to sort their lives out. In Stacey’s mind this all starts at home, and more specifically in their kitchen cupboards, under their beds and in that drawer we all have full of old batteries and hair clips. Stacey is here to save us all, one Big Sort Out at a time.
The premise of the show is that families open up their disorganised homes to Stacey and a team of DIY-ers, who will transform the chaos by streamlining their possessions and making each room work better for their lives. They start by removing every last item in the house and flat laying it in a giant warehouse so the owners can take a long hard look at what they’ve accrued over the years (and then themselves for letting things get this bad) before donating and chucking a huge amount of stuff and taking the rest home to their newly organised abode.
On last night’s show Stacey was helping Wayne and Sue clear out their Cornwall home. They somehow had almost 400 jumpers and 25 fondue forks amongst their mountains of stuff. But what’s so lovely about Sort Your Life Out is that there’s no air of Kim and Aggy 'How Clean Is Your House' style judgement here. Stacey asked Sue if her bowel cancer diagnosis decades before had perhaps influenced her desire to hold on to what she had around her, because she came so close to losing her life. Stacey held Sue as she cried, admitting, ‘It was certainly why I hung onto the baby clothes which now I look at and think 'oh how silly are you?’.
When the team put their lives back together again, clearing space in the house which had formerly had not a clear surface in sight, Sue and Wayne said they were starting a new chapter.
In a world full of chaos and uncertainty, watching Stacey Solomon organise someone’s reels of thread into different clear glass jars, and gently reminding them that they need to let go of the past, felt like a warm hug. Whilst we’ve been inundated with home makeover shows over the years, this one has real heart - and you get some amazing home hacks along the way (who knew a tension rod could make a good shoe storage system?).
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