My neighbor, knowing my line of work, left me this cartoon yesterday which of course made me laugh.  It also got me thinking.

I often joke to my clients, you can say “crap” (or other expletives) just don’t say miscellaneous.  A little professional organizer humor. It’s also a reminder that there is no such thing as the Miscellaneous Store.  I’ve never seen a store aisle or store directory labeled as Miscellaneous. 

Amazon and it’s vendors clearly understand that people don’t have time to sort and identify all the little knick-knacks of our lives.  If you search the word miscellaneous on Amazon you’ll find an array of unrelated items that don’t have any apparent connection. Everything from colorful swim shorts to automotive engine parts to a denim tablecloth. There’s even something called a pantry wardrobe, presumably to contain all your “miscellaneous” pantry and wardrobe items.  (Doesn’t everybody keep their canned peas with their pajamas?)

For a professional organizer, miscellaneous is a meaningless word.

There is no way to identify a miscellaneous item – it implies a quantity – for sorting or categorizing.  Where do you donate miscellaneous to? We can’t assign a home to something called miscellaneous if we don’t first identify what it is and how it’s used.  Junk drawers are notorious for containing miscellaneous items but try and find something in a junk drawer  and you’ll probably leave empty-handed.

Miscellaneous is the catchall term for things that we commonly think of as clutter. The stuff (or crap) that we don’t want to spend the time sorting, purging, assigning a home to or containing.

We kid ourselves into thinking, we can always find it, if it’s in the “junk” drawer, but only if you can see what’s there. A junk drawer is nothing more than a cluttered garage in miniature.

When a client hires us to declutter their garage, We often show them how we will do it by using their junk drawer (or some similar storage area) and they get the idea right away! I also learn how they make decisions.

How we organize one thing is how we organize everything

Junk drawers, filled with “miscellaneous” stuff, are the perfect metaphors for how we organize everything.  There’s nothing wrong with this. We have busy lives and not enough time to deal with it all.  It’s okay to pick and choose how we spend our time and what we prioritize.  Something’s gotta give.

So we buy a package of eight batteries when we only need two and the rest have to go somewhere. We put them in the junk drawer along with the rubber bands; half used package of oven bulbs; the small screwdriver; our kiddo’s missing puzzle piece; the pencil sharpener; the sewing kit; the half used bottle of aspirin; and that “part” that came from something else but we don’t remember what but we keep in anyway, just in case.

Then when we can’t find the thing we’re looking for, we go out and get it at the store that sells,  “Miscellaneous Junk Drawer Crap.”

For a quick primer on how to organize a junk drawer, take a look at this video we did a while back.

If you are in the throws of decluttering, it’s likely you’ll get stuck.  This is because you can’t decide what to keep or go. Just the thought makes the inside of your brain feel like this:

You are probably thinking something along these lines…

• But my best friend gave it to me  (even though it’s not really me).
• I spent a lot of money for this five years ago, I can’t just get rid of it!
• It’s useful but I just don’t have a use for it now. Maybe I should hold onto it, just in case.
• It may be worth something!
• But it belonged to my grandmother!
• I may need it someday.
• I can’t think about this now, I’ll deal with it later.

This is what really happens when we start to declutter. It’s not about the stuff. It’s about how we think about the stuff.

Decluttering is hard! It’s physical, mental and emotional

Stop beating yourself up for not having done it. The key is knowing what questions to ask yourself when you are considering whether or not to keep something.

Here are a few questions to consider next time you are facing a pile of donatable stuff that you want to declutter. The most important of these is… Do I love it? Always err on keeping something you truly love.  Knowing what you love is a good litmus test for everything else.

1. If I saw it again in a store, would I buy it?
2. If it suddenly disappeared would I miss it?
3. Does it bring up bad memories?
4. Do I use it now or at least once a year?
5. If I saw it at a thrift job would I pay a $1 for it? If not, toss it.

So what’s your decision? Keep, Donate or Toss?

What’s your decluttering personality? Stay tuned for my next post.

It’s time to sell your home, or your parents home.  Only problem? It contains 30, 40 or more years worth of stuff.  Your real estate agent says, “I can’t list this house until you declutter!”

Don’t panic.

The good news is that if you live in an area that’s in high demand, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll probably sell your home for a lot more than you or your parents paid for it.

Of course, recent interest rate hikes  mean a smaller pool of buyers. If this means delaying the sale of your home, this could actually be a good thing.  If the house is filled with 30, 40 or more years of stuff, you’re going to need time to get the job done.  You can start planning for the “big downsize” and perhaps by the time you’re ready, interest rates will have flattened or lowered. 

There’s a formula about time and money that’s significant here.

If you just have time, you have options.

If you have both money and some time, you have more options.

No time and no money? Start praying for either.

According to the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO), more than half of Americans are  overwhelmed by the amount of clutter they have. Most Americans have no idea what to do with it or find it too complicated to deal with so they let it build up, taking over their homes and offices.

Time Only

More time means you can chip away at the process of decluttering your home.  It could take weeks, months or even years depending upon how much stuff you have and your habit (or lack thereof) of decluttering over time. With a plan, however, it can be done.

If it all feels too overwhelming, you can always hire an organizing coach to help you come up with a plan you can execute alone or with help.  You can also hire a solo professional organizer to work with you over time. Just don’t expect one organizer to get your home decluttered in a week if you haven’t done anything in years!

Money and a little time

If you have less time to spare but expect a good return on the investment you made in your home, there is a relatively quick way you can get rid of years of clutter.  This is a good option if you are pressed to get your home on the market soon. Keep in mind, this is the more costly option.  Think of it as the price you pay for keeping years and years worth of stuff you didn’t need, never used, never purged or kept “just in case.”

This solution involves hiring a professional organizing company that offers a team-based or crew-based approach to getting your home decluttered. When you go this route you are multiplying the hands-on help and expertise you could get from one professional organizer. 

Think of this as the pre-remodel phase of getting your home readied for sale. I call it the “pre-model.”  How long does it take? It depends on how large and how cluttered your home is AND how quickly you can make decisions and how much energy you have.

What organizers can and can’t do

What organizers can’t do is tell you what to keep. This is not their job. That is your decision. You still have to make hundreds if not thousands of decisions. That being said, most good organizers make this process easier by pre-sorting and supporting or even humoring you to help you make decisions along the way. 

If you’re in mid-life, you may have enough energy to make decisions, with the help of a great team, for several hours.  Seniors and those with cognitive conditions can take longer or only have enough energy to make decisions for a shorter time.  A qualified professional organizing company will take this into account when planning your project.

When you hire a company that can thoroughly and efficiently get your home downsized, this doesn’t mean you can go off to Tahiti while they work. It means that the organizers will take care of most if not all of the physical and logistical demands of getting your home downsized and decluttered.

This could include everything from arranging for haulers, scheduling charity pick ups. selling your unwanted items, purchasing supplies, ordering dumpsters, arranging for document shredding and re-organizing all your retained items until the movers come. It also means sorting and containing everything you don’t want or need from donated items to trash.

What will help you? 

Keep only what you enjoy, what you use or would seriously miss if it disappeared. Your new home may be half the size or your current home. Remember you are doing this for a reason. No object is more important than you are.   

When I tell people I’m a professional organizer, they almost always ask, “is your house immaculate?”

In the early years of my career as a professional organizer, I dodged the question because I didn’t want others to think I wasn’t perfectly organized.

Over time I came to realize that there is no such thing.

When it comes to having a fulfilling, organized life, perfection will get in the way every time.   I don’t want to be model of perfection.   More importantly,  I don’t want my clients to expect that of themselves.

Having a home that you enjoy, where you can spend time relaxing, enjoying time with family and friends, pursuing your interests and taking care of the business of your life, is far more important than having a perfectly organized life. There is no such thing. Life is messy.

The question about how organized I am in real life prompted me to think about other truths  about my personal approach to organization.

So here are 13 confessions about me as professional organizer that may surprise you:

1. 1. My house is not organized perfectly. It’s tidy and I can generally, though not always, find what I’m looking for.  My home is not a Pinterest post or a cover of Architectural Digest.  My style is to organize for my real life, not a fantasy life that I could never achieve let alone maintain.
   2. I don’t have an opinion about what my clients keep, donate or toss. The only time I do care is when I see them make decisions that seem contrary to their goals.  In that case I will ask their permission to gently point it out.
   3. The papers I keep are contained in three places in my home. One is a small file box. Another is an old suitcase that belonged to my mother. The third is a single file drawer. My paper supplies are kept in a drawer and on a shelf.
   4. I rarely scan anything. The only exception when I need to scan or upload a document to share.

   5. If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. I have no short term memory.

   6. I can’t fold a fitted sheet like Martha Stewart. (Believe me I’ve tried dozens of times).  However,  I can make it tidy in a linen closet.
   7. If it’s trash, I don’t feel bad about tossing it.  I do my best to donate or recycle it but the world is not set up yet for zero waste and that’s not my fault. I appreciate sites such as Stopwaste.org when I want to recycle something less typical.
   8. I don’t watch TV shows about organizing or hoarding.
   9. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I don’t decant into containers.  If you want everything in your kitchen, pantry or home to be labeled in pretty, matching ceramic containers, as organizers we are happy to do it.
   10. We don’t have a garage. The previous owners of our home took it down to put in another room. We use it as a TV and exercise area. It has a large storage cabinet we use for holiday supplies, camping, memorabilia, sporting goods and games. Behind it is where I store all my supplies for work. My car is parked in a driveway.
   11. I never liked the term “professional organizer.” Unfortunately they haven’t come up with anything better.
   12. My team organizes better than I do but I know what works and I am great at managing projects, people and getting things done.
   13. When I cook, my kitchen becomes a disaster. I am not an “organized cook.” I guess that’s because I’m focused on the food itself, not on the dish that didn’t get washed, the counter that didn’t get wiped or the container of cream that didn’t get put away. My husband is an incredibly organized cook.

If you have household items or unsorted paper on your floor in boxes or bags, chances are you have a clutter problem.  That’s because bags and boxes are not furniture, not permanently anyway.

1. If you have both unsorted paper and physical items, start with the physical items. You will see results quicker and feel motivated to continue.
   
2. Sort the items on a clear surface, such as a card table, counter or ironing board if that’s the only surface available.
3. As soon as the box is empty, break it down and place it by your recycling bin to see space right away. It’s important that you see see results right away to stay motivated. 
4. Now it’s time to make decisions. Look at each item by category and decide if you are using it now or whether it’s something you love. If you wouldn’t buy it in a store, don’t love it, haven’t used it, or it brings up negative emotions, let it go. If it feels good to keep it for yourself, then keep it.
5. Most clean and usable items can be donated to conventional charities such as Goodwill, Salvation Army or a local thrift shop.  Be sure to check days and times they accept donations. Since COVID, many charities have limited their donation drop off times or require appointments.
6. Don’t spend a lot of time on where you donate your items. This is a form of procrastination.  Some haulers now will take items for donation.  Two of my favorites in the San Francisco Bay Area are NixxitJunk.com and Remoov.
7. If you have high value items consider consignment, or online platforms to sell them. Do whatever is easiest or makes the best use of your time.
8. If you plan to use your empty boxes for donations, be sure you can carry them. You are better off using a double paper-bag or reusable shopping bag for donated items.
9. Now the fun part: Look at what you kept and decide where it should live in your home. Like you live in your home everything in your home should have a home. An item’s home gets determined first by asking, What room would I look for this? Consider also, where  will it be contained?  For example, a certain piece of furniture, a specific closet, drawer or a type of  bin?  Don’t worry if these areas are already cluttered themselves. Get them closer to home!
10. Do this for each item you’ve decided to keep before moving on to the next bag or box.

Celebrate the end of 2021 with inspiring tips to get and keep you organized in 2022!

As a veteran professional organizer, I’ve shared thousands of tips over the years on home organizing, downsizing and planning a less stressful move.

To celebrate the end of 2021, (phew) I looked back over my blog posts from this year to dig up individual pearls of wisdom I could share again to inspire you for 2022.  Do any of these resonate with you?

Treat organizing your home as a practice, not a one-time event

Home organizing, whether it be your guest room, junk drawer or home office, is as much a mind-set as it is a habit.  Practice organizing and over time you will develop an organizing habit.  That means, keeping an eye on high clutter areas like your clothes closet, office or garage. Continuously ask yourself  “do I want/need/love this item?”

Aim for progress not perfection

Don’t expect your home, office or storage area to look like an ad for “the most organized Mom in the world!” You do not have to spend hours refilling matching containers with cute “blackboard” labels if that’s not who you are. (I know it’s not who I am.) Better to do a small action then let yourself be paralyzed by the enormity of a perfectly organized space.

The less you have the less you have to organize and the easier it is to maintain

In a consumer culture,  shopping can be a competitive sport or even a form of therapy.  It’s difficult to keep a lid on the stuff coming into your home. One of the best things you can do is prevent those things from cluttering your space in the first place. Cancel those subscriptions, stop the junk mail, don’t buy in bulk if you live alone, don’t keep something just because it’s useful. Only keep it if you use it!

Consider your time, privacy and convenience 

It’s great to pass along things to friends, family, neighbors, even strangers. I love the “Buy Nothing” sites as an example where you can give away everyday items you no longer want to people in your neighborhood.  It’s also a great way to keep things out of the landfill.  But as my client’s often hear me say, “Don’t let the small stuff get in the way of the big stuff.” If you have a roomful of items you no longer want, consider the easiest option for letting go of most items all at once.   If you’re stuck, it’s always great to ask, “Is it worth my time?”

Sort it into categories that resemble the aisles of a department store

Clothes with clothes, shoes with shoes, office supplies with office supplies, games with games, tools with tools, etc.  Think about categories you would find in a department or hardware store. Don’t make any decisions about keeping or tossing until you’ve staged all the categories. By the way, you may need a folding table or two.  Seeing your items sorted, and by category, helps you make quick decisions about what to keep. Do you really need all 26 screwdrivers?

Just because something is usable doesn’t mean you have to keep it

There are no clutter police. Almost everything is usable but if you don’t use it, don’t keep it. Ask yourself did I use this in the last year and do I intend to use it in the next year? (e.g., Holiday decor falls into this category). If your answer is no, let it go.

Your home does not have to look like a cover from a lifestyle magazine or a social media post if that’s not who you are. It bears repeating!

If you are not sure whether or not to keep something, ask yourself, “If I saw it in a store, would I buy it?”

We keep things out of habit, delayed decision making, guilt and a host of other reasons. If you are trying to declutter or simplify your life, this is a great way to know if it stills has value for you.

Honor the memory, person or experience with something meaningful 

When you walk through a museum or someone’s home and admire painting or an object of art,  do you take it home and keep it? Hopefully not – unless you want to end up in jail. Sometimes you can simply enjoy the memory of a person, place or experience without having every item that reminds you of them. Pick one or two things that truly honors the person or best represents your experience.

Only the owner of the item gets to decide about whether it stays or goes

I have a rule when I work with couples. Only the “owner of the decision” has the say about keep vs. go.  The non-owner does not get a say unless explicitly asked.  I’ve avoided many arguments with this rule. The only exception should be if one member of the couple delegates the decision making to their spouse. In this case, the delegating spouse has to set the parameters very carefully. No coming back later and saying,  “I wanted that!”

When you’ve got to get it done quickly, efficiently and expertly, hire a professional organizer

Here are a few great reasons to hire a professional organizer or move manager

• Your in-laws are coming to spend the holidays with you and your guest room is packed-full of stuff.
• Your Realtor® wants to put your home on the market but not until you’ve downsized and decluttered 30+ years worth of your family’s belongings.
• You can’t get your car into your garage anymore and winter is approaching.
• Your home office looks like it was a hit by a tornado and you are losing money, afraid of upcoming tax season, and not getting things done even though you are great at what you do!
• You were in a hurry to unpack everything in your new home when you moved in and now you can’t find anything.

I hope one of these tips has inspired you.  Feel free to share which of these you plan to try for 2022 and why? I would love to hear from you.

About six months ago, we were getting ready to remodel our basement.  I had to move my collection of record albums to another storage area and as I did so, I thought, “why am I still keeping these?”

I didn’t bother to wait for the answer. Instead, I put them away for safekeeping and walked away.

About two months later, with the remodel complete, I moved the albums back into the storage cabinet and thought, “why am I still keeping these?” This time, it occurred to me that if I took pictures of all the album covers I could check to see if they were available for streaming online, something I would have suggested to my clients.

It took about 30 minutes to snap a picture of all 115 albums, a mix of mostly rock, folk, R&B and some classical.  Then I walked away.

A month ago, I went to put away our outdoor chair cushions for the winter. As I did, I saw the record albums in the cabinet meant for the cushions. We really need the whole space for the cushions, I thought, so I took the records, divided them between four, double-bagged grocery bags, and left them in the basement on the floor.

“When I get rid of these, it will be easy to carry them away.”  Then I walked away.

About a week ago, I went downstairs and spotted the four bags.

“This is ridiculous! I’m an experienced professional organizer. Why am I having so much trouble with this?”

So I started asking myself the kinds of questions  I ask my clients:

• Do I love these? – I love the music and yes, some of the albums themselves.
• Would you miss them if they disappeared? –  Not necessarily, as long as I could get the music again.
• Would you buy the albums again if you saw them? – Definitely not.
• So what do you want to do?

I immediately went to my phone and created a post to sell the albums on a popular website. Then I created a shareable link that included the photos of all the album covers I had taken two months ago. Within minutes interested buyers responded with offers.

Being able to share the photos right away really helped since buyers could scan the collection before making an offer.

Proud of myself for finally moving forward I told my husband, “Guess what? I posted my albums for sale.” He replied, “are you keeping any?”

Suddenly a swell of emotion came over me. How did I not think of this?

As an organizer, I always ask my clients who have collections they want to sell, which, if any, do they want to keep? Somehow in my eagerness to get the job done, I forgot to ask myself the same question.

Since no one had actually bought the collection yet, I thought, “I’ll set aside the ones worth it to me to frame and hang,” but as I did so I realized I didn’t want to hang any of them.  One by one I quickly went through the four bags of albums.  That’s when the memories started flooding back.

Dancing with my friends to Blondie’s Parallel Lines in college.  Singing to Joni Mitchell’s Blue in my bedroom as a teenager. Recalling the first time I felt the power of Janis Joplin’s gravelly voice on Pearl.  Pining for an old sweetheart while listening to Billie Holiday.  Remembering the very first record I ever played on my parent’s portable record player, Getz/Gilberto. I knew the words to The Girl from Ipanema when I was six.

I put all the albums back in the bags and took the best offer.

The buyer arrived that day  – a 30 something guy who worked as an environmental scientist but had a love of albums and a small hobby-business selling them.  I sat with him while he went through each of them to check their condition. As he did, I heard myself talking like the typical late middle-aged music fan I am, reminiscing about seeing Sly and the Family Stone at Madison Square Garden and how I really wasn’t a huge fan of  The Beatle’s Abbey Road but the cover was so iconic.

These albums were the soundtrack of my life. And that’s when it hit me. “I’m not just selling my albums. I’m giving up part of myself.”

It wasn’t just the albums I was saying goodbye to. It was me, Liz – the way I spelled it then –  the white, middle class, introspective, New York City kid who felt the sounds of Marvin Gaye and Aretha in her bloodstream.  The one who played Fleetwood Mac and Rickie Lee Jones, over and over again in her dorm room or rocked to the sounds of the The Pretenders, The Kinks and Cream in her first apartment.

She was me, the student who stopped one day on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a freshman at Boston University, and paid the astronomical sum of $10 to a street vendor to buy the album It’s A Beautiful Day with it’s iconic cover of the young mountain girl, her hat and dress pushed by the wind.

“Prophetic,” I thought.  The band was from San Francisco, the place I would find myself moving to almost ten years later.

Back in my basement, I watched as each vinyl record passed through the buyers hands as he inspected them.  After we agreed on a price, he asked me, quite generously, if there was anything I wanted to keep?  Should I have said, “Yes! I want it all back. The years and the time?” I didn’t.

Instead, I picked up the last record he’d looked at, It’s A Beautiful Day. He hadn’t heard of it until I started hum-singing the band’s most famous track, “White Bird” the song about a bird trapped in a golden cage, on a winter’s day, in the rain. Then, of course, I had to tell him the story of how I bought it.

Last year you spent a week, month or a lot of money, to organize your home, or one area of it, and now it’s back where you started.

During Covid, you coped last year by shopping. You got into a new hobby.  You inherited items from your family.  Either way, you got some new stuff.  It may even be better than the old stuff but the old stuff is still there.  The stuff you had and the new stuff didn’t get put away or it piled above other stuff you already have.

In addition, all those great storage systems for containing your stuff stopped working for you or your family.  You started to fall back into old habits. Now you’ve got more stuff than before.

My advice to you: Don’t be discouraged. It may be time to examine your thinking, perspectives and habits when it comes to obtaining and organizing. Remember, sometimes life gets in the way and your priorities change.

First and foremost, consider it a learning, not an opportunity to shame yourself!

How often do you say to yourself…?

I’ll get to it later

I’m keeping it just in case

I’ll just put it here, for now

My family isn’t cooperating!

I couldn’t find it so I bought another

I’ll go through it tomorrow

I may need it some day

It belonged to my parents. I just couldn’t toss it!

Everything in life is an experiment

Remember that great feeling you had when everything had a “home” and it was so neat and tidy?

It didn’t happen by accident and whether you did it yourself or had help from friends or professionals, chances are you learned something you’ve just forgotten.  When you forget, your old habits return.

It’s like other things we try to change in our lives. (Believe me. I know this firsthand!)

For example, imagine you need to get to a healthy weight. It’s going to take action and consistency. Not just once, not just for a week, but every day or at least more days than not.  You’ll also need a plan based on your strengths, needs and goals.

The same is true when you want to develop an organizing habit. 

Know your strengths

Are you visual? Consider “envisioning’ what an organized space looks like for you. Draw or design it or find a picture online or in a magazine that inspires you. Look around and start to notice what you like about your space, not just what bothers you.

Are you tactile? Go around the space, from right to left, and mark all the items you want to get rid of with some painters tape. Touch the items and decide if they still hold meaning for you or not.

Are you a great listener? Consider watching organizing videos online, listen to podcasts or attend a free organizing talk in your area. Organizers often speak for free at retirement communities, real estate groups, community centers or libraries as a way to promote their services.  Better yet, get some free advice

Are you physically agile or strong? You may be able to work alone and declutter yourself. Perhaps you can build yourself new storage systems or shelves. This type of strength is called kinesthetic.

Are you intuitive and pretty self-aware? This will help you to edit what you have. Ask yourself key questions that make it a whole lot easier to feel in control and less overwhelmed by your clutter.

• Do I love this?
• Does it bring in negative emotions or bad memories?
• If I saw it in a store, would I buy it again?
• Has it been more than a year since I used it?
• If it should disappear would I miss it?
• Do I know someone who would enjoy it more than I do?
• Would it give me pleasure to give it away?
• Am I truly honoring the person or their memory by keeping this?

Consider your needs

Sometimes we just don’t want to do something. We “don’t feel like it.” Other times it’s the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning. Your needs are the basics of what makes life possible for you. For some it may be survival needs for others, they may be linked to your highest values.  In general needs are the pre-requisites for functioning at your best.  Consider your needs and how they fit into these four questions:

1. Is this something that’s important to me now?
2. Will having this space more organized help me get up in the morning or improve my day to day life?
3. Would learning a new organizing habit make me feel better about myself or change the way I perceive myself now?
4. What would happen if I left things as is? What would be the consequence? 

Reflect on your WHY

Take a moment to identify what you want, how you’ll know you got there and why it’s important to you right now. This could be a short-term goal or a long-term goal. The short-term goal can tie into the long term goal but it should be satisfying in and of itself. For example, if you want to get your garage organized again, start with organizing one cabinet or the tool box.  If your guest room has been overrun with stuff and is now a storage area, start with just the things on the floor and leave the surfaces, closets and closet organizing to later.

Achieving small successes will have a big impact on your ability to meet your larger goal.  Along the way, you will also want to clarify why this is important to you so you can feel and be motivated to take actions that move you closer to your goal. Try asking yourself these four questions:

1. If everything were organized just the way I imagine, what would that bring me?
2. What would I be able to do that I can’t do now?
3. How would it feel to know that I have reached my goal and am maintaining it?
4. Besides me, who in my life would be most impacted if I did or did not develop this habit?

Change is certain when you know who you are

The process of change and developing any habit is not impossible. As a professional organizer, move manager and personal advocate for those who want to make change in their lives, I can tell you I wasn’t a “born organizer.” My home is tidy but not a magazine showpiece. I learned to be more organized as I discovered my strengths, needs and what was important to me (and what wasn’t).

It works for me and my husband. We each have our shared and separate responsibilities to keep up with it and I don’t take for granted that I can share those tasks with someone else.  If I lived alone, I know it would be harder but not impossible. I also know I would need to make choices about what I could accept and live with.

Even if you live alone, are a single parent, have learned to cope with a physical or cognitive challenge or are recently retired, know that you already have certain strengths that can help you to develop and maintain an organizing habit, enjoy your life and get more done.

The Good Side of Failure

Editor’s Note: Cara Lanz is a freelance writer, digital marketer, and self-proclaimed word nerd. She is also a god-send to me.  This month she is my guest blogger. When she isn’t creating digital content for clients across the country, she is blogging on MidwesternHomeLife, her own lifestyle website. She loves to share simple and (sometimes) healthy recipes, debt-free tips, and inspiration for creating a happy home in the heartland. You can find Cara at https://midwesternhomelife.com/. 

I knew I needed to declutter my dishes when it came down to a math problem I just couldn’t solve. I had two people in the house and a dinnerware cabinet brimming with — among other things — 21 dinner plates, 12 salad plates, 17 saucers, and 20 soup bowls. 

Now, in my defense, they were all matching– well, as matching as Fiestaware can be — and neatly organized. No haphazard piles or plastic containers shoved in there. So, on its face, it didn’t really appear as though I needed to declutter my dishes. 

But the math just didn’t work. Plus, I had other cabinets bursting at the seams with things I wanted to move into my dinnerware cabinet. 

How would I go about deciding what to keep and what to get rid of? 

Enter Lis McKinley, owner of LET’S MAKE ROOM. As an organizational expert, she’s helped hundreds of others figure this very thing out. 

But, I wondered: Would she finally be the one to pry my superfluous Fiestaware from my gripped fingers, or would I be the one and only person she has not been able to help? I really had no idea which way this was going to go. 

So we set up a Zoom meeting. 

My Virtual Organizing Call with Lis

When I first got on a call with Lis, I noticed two things right away. She’s warm and welcoming and made every crazy organizational dilemma I had seem like it was totally normal, and she’s heard it a million times. She’s also extremely decisive in that teacher kind of way that just made me want to do what she said because I knew she knew what she was talking about. 

She laid out our plan for exactly what we were going to do during our time together. She even had a clever acronym for her process: S.P.A.C.E. She gently took the time to explain what each of the steps meant and made sure I understood them. 

For the next hour, we: 

Sorted

Purged

Assigned

Contained

Equalized

Here’s what that looked like. 

Sort

To get started, I pulled all my dishes out of the cabinet and put them into like piles. Bowls with bowls, plates with plates. Not only did this help me to see with clarity exactly what I was dealing with, but it also gave me an empty cabinet, aka, a clean slate, to start all over again. 

Purge

The goal of purging was to make decisions about which items I wanted to keep, based on four criteria: Do I love them, want them, need them, or use them? We had really thoughtful conversations and she asked me things like, “If you saw that in a store, would you buy it again?” We also discussed how often we entertain, how many adults and kids, and which dishes we need to accommodate them. Then we pared down from there. It all made perfect sense. 

We also sifted through things that I knew just weren’t going to go back into the cupboard. These super fussy 2-part martini chiller/chilled appetizer glasses, for example. Also, some heirloom dishes that are pretty enough, but I’m just not using them. 

Assign

During the assign process, I had to find a home for everything. To figure that out, I had to think about where I would most likely look for things if I needed to use them. So a good amount of my dinnerware was assigned back to the cupboard. 

Those fussy 2-part glasses — and other things I’ll never use again — went straight into the “Donate” box. The heirloom dishes went into my “Ask Mom If She Wants Them Back” box. But that wasn’t the end of it. Lis made me pick a date when I would drop off the “Donate” items and send a pic to my mom of the items that were potentially going to boomerang back to her. So, now I was accountable. But, it was all on a timeline that I chose. 

Contain

Now it was time to put things back. Contain my pared-down dishes into the cupboard. But it wasn’t just, “Okay now put everything back.” Lis asked me to think about each item I was putting back and where it would be best to put it. We had discussions about things like, “Well, we really use these bowls more than those bowls,” and “I can’t reach those plates very well when the dishwasher is open.” So it was super strategic, and I could tell it was going to set me up for long-term success. 

Also, Lis knew one of my goals was to get rid of so much stuff in this cupboard that I could free up my entire top shelf, drop it down to a level I could actually reach, and transport items I use all the time from another hard-to-reach cupboard. So while Lis sat in the Zoom room, I hauled over a bar stool, climbed up on my counter, and dropped down that top shelf. Just like that, that cupboard became 33.33% more useful to me!

Equalize

During the equalize phase — this was the tidying up at the end of it all — I easily put things back where they belonged. Lis explained that the process of assigning and containing is what makes it possible to equalize, because I had already established a home for everything. 

I had a pile of plates and bowls that were going to be put away into my pantry for when I needed them for a large party. I had certain dishes I only use for my food blog that needed to go where those things live. At last, everything was where it should be. 

My Dishes, Decluttered

By the end of our hour and a half together, my cupboard was whittled down to a svelte 10 dinner plates, 10 salad plates, and 10 soup bowls. Zero saucers. Lots of room for everything we need, in the places that make the most sense. AND a completely empty shelf ready to take on the overflow when I use the S.P.A.C.E. method to clear out my next cupboard.