Home Rescue is life-changing for Kilcullen family

Alan and Orla during filming, sorting the clutter.

Orla and Alan Condron from Kilcullen feature on RTE2 TV's 'Home Rescue' programme this evening at 9.30pm. This is their story.

“Do you need help? Do you need Home Rescue?”

The Instagram message that popped up as Orla Condron scrolled through her phone while sitting in her parked car seemed directed at her personally, writes Brian Byrne. Without even thinking she clicked on the link through to RTE TV’s Home Rescue website and found the application form for consideration of her plight.

“I knew I did need help,” she says, remembering how, in part due to illness, clutter had simply overwhelmed the home in Kilcullen she and her husband Alan have lived in for 20 years. With their two pre-teen children, a dog, some birds and a couple of cats, it just seemed there wasn’t space enough for all because of the amount of stuff which had accumulated. The matter was affecting family relationships, and health. “As it piled up, we kept saying we’ll deal with it,” Alan says. “But it had reached the stage where we simply didn’t know where to start.”

Sitting in her car that day, Orla spent over an hour tapping in their details and situation, writing and deleting, until, inadvertently, she clicked ‘send’. “I was only halfway done, but it must have gone through.” She went home, and said nothing to Alan. Until a few days later there was a phone call. “Hello, I’m Jane from Home Rescue …” 

Alan’s reaction was at first dubious, but after some thought he figured it might be just what they needed. The next stage was to make short videos from each family member, giving their own thoughts on the situation, and submitting them to the programme. A visit from the Coco Television producer followed very shortly afterwards, and the Condrons were accepted. The date for production was set for a week in February, during which the family had to vacate their house for the duration.

“Everybody was so nice to us, and they had schedules for every day of the week, starting with the decluttering team,” Orla remembers. “I have to admit that I did find that very hard at first.” Everything was brought to a room in Kilcullen Community Centre for sorting. The format requires family members to decide what’s for keeping, what’s for recycling, and what is for disposal. Generally, after some initial difficulties, deciding what to get rid of becomes surprisingly easy.

“We have expert clutter-busters and the most eye-opening thing is when all a family's stuff is taken to a separate location and laid out for them,” says Jenny Moylan from the programme’s production team. “It may be, for instance, that they have 12 suitcases, and then the logic hits that ‘we don’t need 12 suitcases’.” The de-cluttering process is carried out room by room — “we wouldn’t have space for everything in the house at once." After the first rounds, there’s a second 'cull’. “And it’s almost guaranteed at that point, that they’ll say more often, ‘you know, I don’t need that, let it go’.”  Alan Condron agrees. "Aidan and Laura in the declutter team were great. They asked things like, 'how long is it since you wore that?' When we'd say 'more than a year', then that was the signal to let it go."

Designer Dee Coleman with Orla and Alan.

Meantime, the interior team led by designer Dee Coleman and builder Peter Finn had been at work through the week, making changes to furniture, layout and light alterations in whatever rooms are being sorted out. Things get pretty busy on the last day of the working week. “There can be anywhere between 25-30 people on the site, depending on what is being done,” Jenny Moylan says. For the Condron’s project, the focus was on the three bedrooms of the home.

At the end of the process is the reveal to the family of what their house now looks like. That will be seen by viewers of the series on this evening 4 May, on RTE2 at 9.30pm. But Orla and Alan say the difference in their daily life has been 'massive'. "Now everything has a place," Alan says. "Before, our clothes were all over the place, you wouldn't know where to put them. Now our clothes, the kids' clothes, all have their own wardrobes, and it's so easy." The process has also visibly eased the mental stress which both of them were under before.

They were fortunate to get on the series. There are typically hundreds of applications for the six programmes in each year, for many different reasons, perhaps a change in family circumstances that prompts people to seek a revamp. “Sometimes they have just come to a point where they want to do something,” Jenny Moylan says. “When they see the advertisement looking for families, they say ‘that’s for me’.” But she emphasises that there’s a strict vetting process. “You’re asking them to open up their homes to a whole TV crew, to the whole country actually — it’s exposure and we have to protect them, make sure it is for them. We all get so invested in it as a team, and you can just fall in love with the whole family.”

For the families concerned, Home Rescue really can be life-changing. “All that clutter, in the attic, through the house, it’s weighing on them without them even knowing. This is hitting ‘refresh’.”

And for Orla and Alan? "We're on top of it now. We couldn't have done it without help, but we're not going back to the way we were."

This article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.

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