Maintaining order

16 March 2015

My office closet, part of the Clutter-Free and Awesome: 12 Pretty Organized Spaces article on iVillage

I love doing whole-house transformations. That’s when my team and I come in and create order in every room of a client’s home. We’re working side by side with the client, decluttering and organizing in ways that work for them.

So far this year, we’ve done four really rewarding transformations. The clients are thrilled at the end of the last session. But the proof of the pudding is whether they’re able to maintain the order.

I visited a client yesterday whose home we finished at the end of January. It still looked amazing, and that made my heart sing. It got me thinking about the basic tenets behind maintaining order. It’s really not complicated. They are:

Establishing a place for everything
Making a habit of putting things away in their place
Catching up quickly if backsliding occurs
Weeding constantly
Shopping mindfully and thinking about where a new item will be stored before buying it

If you’re able to follow those five tenets, you’ll have an orderly home. The trick is in owning no more items than you can comfortably store. When you have a number of belongings that’s appropriate to the storage space you have for them, then it’s easy to have a place for everything and put everything in its place.

In almost every one of my client organizing projects, decluttering is the first step. You can hire a professional organizer to help you declutter. Or you can do it on your own. (Here’s a short step-by-step series I wrote last year on decluttering.) Just don’t skip this important step in creating and maintaining order!

Tagged with: decluttering, order, team organizing