This week’s feature on downsizing from St Albans decluttering expert Tracy Ross couldn’t have come at a better time.

Because after what feels like years of fruitless searching we've found a rental property - and it's properly small.

Far from being the dream home, this is a stop gap to see us through the next however long until we find somewhere to buy.

We've viewed it twice. The first time we were dismissive - it was too tired and tiny, something better would come along. A week later our desperation levels were through the roof and we'd panicked and paid the deposit.

We viewed it again in a bid to suss out exactly what we'd taken on and realised some serious planning was going to be required if we were going to fit enough of our stuff in.

This place is half the size of our current home, so all bar the absolute essentials will be heading for storage.

Tracy suggests creating a decluttering plan, and spending 45 minutes at a time working your way through every space in your home.

It's early days yet for our personal masterplan. We've been measuring all the essentials (beds, sofas and so on) and sizing them up against the new place's floor plan to see how much stuff we can squeeze in.

The kids are doing their bit by emptying the boxes of random clutter from under their beds all over their floors and realising they still love almost all of it very, very much. Which has been a great help.

Tracy recommends kicking this process off three months before you move. We're looking at four weeks max, so will have to do the best we can in this limited timeframe.

Like all aspects of moving, it's going to be a mental squeeze as well as a physical one.

But on the bright side, at least we won't be camping in someone's garden - so compared to where we were last week at this time, things are on the up.