reclaiming our house
Our house has been dying of clutter for as long as I can remember. The spouse-unit and I came with separate households and over the years, stuff has just accumulated. After several unsuccessful attempts to tackle the disaster in our own, we finally called in professional help.
Our NAPO-certified organizer first came over for an hour to assess the damage. She walked through the house with us, room by room, listening to our hopes (and dreams) and pointing out things that worked and didn’t work. We both liked her and her ideas and methodology, but a major selling point for me was that she had four kids. It was great that she had practical experience organizing a home with kids. She prepared us in advance that, for the size of our humble dwelling, we would have to downsize our stuff by 50%.
So far, it’s been awesome. We’ve done the living room, kitchen, the guest/t.v.-watching room, and the spouse’s office space and while there still stuff to go through, having tossed out so much old junk has been freeing. A lot of it was just getting rid of things that didn’t fit the space we had. (Like half of my yarn!) The spouse had a couple of near-fainting moments from having to part with such cool leftovers as the robotic dinosaur, but recovered quickly enough to fight the tougher battles, like over his numerous multiplying-like-wet-Mogwai network cables. *rolls eyes*
At the end of the day, good organizers don’t come cheap, but since it’s starting to feel like a whole new house and it’s taken us this long to get here, I consider it an investment well made.


May 15th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Awesome! We struggle with the same issues. It gets more, er, challenging with little ones sprinkling fragments of toys around the house daily.
We have daemon of a cleaner, Josephine, who comes once a week to put us right. Any clutter gets “Josephine’d”. Sometime we’ll need to spend a few hours just trying to reunite parts of toys that are now ‘tidied’ into boxes in different rooms of the house.
We found this book a great help and inspiration http://www.amazon.com/Clear-Your-Clutter-Feng-Shui/dp/0767903595 (also http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Sacred-Space-Feng-Shui/dp/0553069160 if that appeals)
May 30th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Wish I had a dumpster. I think then we could get rid of a lot of things…. Thats quite an accomplishment, you should feel proud & lighter..
Lisa
June 18th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Ha! I wish I had a dumpster, too – it took several loads of stashing things in the garage until we could either make room in the trash or had time to stop by Goodwill. :-)