Home: Organize: That’s Messed Up
Banish clutter and chaos from your home office with a professional organizer
The battleground of my marriage measures 20 by 30 feet. It has neutral carpet. Built-in shelves. Ample closet space. As far as basements go, it’s perfectly fine. It’s all the crap down there that’s the problem.
Some months back, attempting to strengthen my hold on other parts of the home, I told my journalist husband that
The battleground of my marriage measures 20 by 30 feet. It has neutral carpet. Built-in shelves. Ample closet space. As far as basements go, it’s perfectly fine. It’s all the crap down there that’s the problem.
Some months back, attempting to strengthen my hold on other parts of the home, I told my journalist husband that I would accept the box towers and mounds of paper belowground if he would agree to my terms: basically, relative neatness aboveground. As he took control of the subterranean floor we even gave it a new (trendy) name. It would be his man-space, where he could contentedly collect whatever books and newspapers and novels that make him, in his writerly way, happiest.
Only it didn’t hold. There was the baby, and the baby stuff, and an unexpected career twist that meant we would now both be workng at home. And there were his boxes again. Dozens of boxes, although the three that bothered me most were plopped in the middle of the room.
On the upper floors, I could maintain some appearance of order, but behind the facade of “open” living space, clutter lurked in every overstuffed drawer. Bills became an issue. Not for money reasons: We could pay them if I could manage to get them to the mailbox before they got lost again under Restoration Hardware catalogs. One illustrative day, I found myself in our pediatrician’s waiting room calling the water company on my husband’s cell phone (I couldn’t find mine, alright?) to prevent a scheduled water shutoff. I’m not poor, I wanted to explain to the Society Hill moms within earshot. I’m just disorganized.
So when I started talking to Susan Sabo, founder and president of Organizers Inc. in West Chester (610-738-9220, organizersinc.com), and she started telling me about how she specializes in creating home offices (more often for Main Line millionaires), giving families not only efficient work space but also a “command center” for running their households, I was hooked. When she showed up at my South Philadelphia rowhouse carrying a chichi pink tote with binders and tablets inside, I felt almost hopeful.
Like any sensible reinforcement she quickly — in her energized but nonjudgmental way — got a hold on the incoming. “You have to stop the flow of paper coming in,” she explained, “before we even tackle the storing of it downstairs.” We achieved this by heading online (see “Tips For Reclaiming Your Home Office” on page 48) and then moved downstairs, where we started in on the boxes.
My boxes, that is. The ones filled largely with wedding gifts I’d never used. “Lead by example,” she said, and we started pitching all manner of things that had my wedding date stenciled on them. And then we moved on to files and books.
While we worked — and by worked, I mean threw things out as though they were on fire — we talked some more about Adam and how deeply rooted our differences about stuff can be: “We need to deal with [his] psychological makeup a little and ask, how does keeping all this stuff serve him?” Maybe, she said, “he never learned the skill to discern what he needs to keep or not.” And then there was the tougher love: “If he keeps collecting like this, it will become a fire hazard.” As part of my negotiations with him, she suggested buying a kitchen timer and setting it for some short amount of time each Saturday to make the task seem less daunting. Smart tactic, I thought, but it assumed I had some modicum of control over him.
And then we had a wee little discussion — just a brief what if kind of thing — where she pondered aloud if Adam even had any idea what he’d long ago stored in some of these corners. But mostly we kept to my side of the line, and she helped me drag bags and boxes filled with junk to the garbage outside, where about an hour later a thunderstorm rained down all over them. I’d like to say that when Adam got home that night, he shared my glee in the progress we’d made. In truth, the soggy books outside made him go, well, ape shit. Hemingway? War and Peace? David Sedaris?!
So I’d gone a little overboard. I tried to explain the concepts of limited space, paper as kindling, preparedness for any future moves. But my entreaties piled up as uselessly as the ruined paperbacks he was now dumping on the kitchen floor.
It wasn’t the best night. But he’d gotten over it, mostly, by the time Sabo’s associate, Sandy Nagahashi, showed up for a follow-up one week later. By then, I’d half-done just enough of my “homework” to make the basement a complete disaster and had already snapped at Adam that no, he couldn’t get out of the organizing session just because he had a deadline in two hours. Sandy seemed to sense the tension even before we had the spat about whether or not it’s acceptable to keep every issue of the New Yorker, and was a gentle but skillful referee.
Turns out, Adam wasn’t quite ready for her idea of a “system,” but he did go through a half dozen of his boxes. And he agreed to her compromise: a cleaned-up corner of the basement where we dragged straightened-up filing cabinets and labeled bins that he was to prune further at a later date. Not a complete success, perhaps, but the room looked so much better after she left that I actually wanted to spend time down there myself. Which I did, mostly by standing at the edge of Adam’s desk while he worked and enthusing: Doesn’t it look better? Don’t you feel better down here? And: Aren’t you so happy we did this together?
