Peace of Mind Organizing

Home away from home

18 August 2007

One of the wonderful things about being a knitter is that when you’re away from home you can almost always find a comfortable place to hang out. Many cities—even some towns—have yarn stores. And when a knitter walks into a store and gazes at shelves full of yarn, he or she is instantly at home.

I started a ten-day trip yesterday. I flew to San Francisco to attend a workshop on estate organizing (more on that in a later entry). After settling into my room at a hotel near the airport, I took BART into the city to see my friend Gina. I had an hour or so to spare, so thanks to the miracle that is Google, I preplanned a visit to a lovely yarn store, Urban Knitting Studio. When I walked in, I immediately felt calm, welcome, and a little bit excited. I had hoped, unrealistically, not to spend money on yarn, since I’m trying to work from my stash. What was I thinking?

I saw some yarn I’d never seen before, Fleur by Anny Blatt, which the yarn store had wisely knitted up into a scarf. It was irresistible—it looks like little flowers are on the scarf. So I bought some. And some more.

Urban Knitting Studio’s owner, Helen Kim, gave me a tour of the sock yarn and even let me fondle the sock she’s currenting working on. So of course I bought some of that yarn. It’s bamboo/wool/nylon sock yarn (Panda yarn, from Crystal Palace). I selected a wonderful solid mandarin orange.

(Speaking of socks, I finished my first sock this past week! Many thanks to my knitting pal Sue Ames for her help. I’m starting the second sock on this trip. Well, technically Sue started it for me since I can’t seem to master the long-tail cast on. Thanks, Sue.)

The point of this post is that I highly recommend a visit to any local yarn store while travelling. I’ll be visiting at least one more on this trip, Knitochet in my home town of Walla Walla, Washington. It’s organized by color, is spacious, and always a treat.

For me, this is what it is all about

16 July 2007

I just got back from an intense five days working with a client in another state. I know from her feedback and from what we accomplished that I really made a difference in her life. That’s what I love about this work!

I spent five days with this client about 10 months ago. Her house is extremely cluttered and last September we spent all our time in one room. In the time between my visits, she was able to make some more progress, and the weekly phone coaching we did more recently helped accelerate that progress and get her to the point where she could have me back.

We worked on two rooms plus a closet last week and the amount we were able to accomplish in that time was almost surreal.

To give you an idea:

The clutter was high and thick in the bedroom.

After two-and-a-half days of intensive work, the clutter in the bedroom was under control.

We were under extreme time pressure, so “after” pictures were taken before vacuuming or tidying. The rooms aren’t fine-tuned yet. The other important thing to note is that the house was in such a state that my client and her family had moved into a rental house three years ago. So it’s not being lived in, which allowed us to store the things the client wanted to keep in boxes awaiting the remodeling of the house once it’s decluttered and their eventual move back in.

Here’s another set of pictures:

This room had become unusable.

We tackled the clutter on this side of the room in just half a day!

My client deserves the credit for this. While her adult son and I did the physical lifting, she did all of the mental and emotional lifting. The amount of clutter we had to tackle was overwhelming. Yet she remained focused and plowed through all the clutter with single-minded purpose. She’s been in therapy and done a lot of internal work that allowed her to be ready to make these kinds of difficult decisions. And, with the exception of a couple of categories of items, her decisions about what to keep were quite reasonable. She got rid of a lot of stuff. Something like 123 33-gallon garbage bags were picked up by the trash hauler and an equal number of bags of donatables were given to Goodwill.

My presence allowed her to focus on the decluttering. She’d committed the time I was there (and money—it was a big financial commitment) to work on this one task. We had a goal, which we achieved, of clearing both upstairs rooms in the four-and-a-half days we had together. We worked long, but not unreasonable, hours. By my being there, she was supported emotionally, and I was able to provide the kind of physical support (sorting, packing, dispersing the items as she decluttered) that allowed her to create this huge change in her home.

The synergy we shared was exciting. I came back to St. Louis exhausted but excited for her and validated in my work.

I feel privileged to help people this way. This client and I will keep working together with weekly phone coaching and I’m sure that, thanks to the jumpstart of this intense time we spent together, she’ll be able to achieve her goal of remodeling and moving back into her home by the end of the year. If that didn’t give me job satisfaction, I don’t know what would!

Edited to add (in 2010): I’m happy to report that this client did get her house emptied and renovated and she and her moved back in in 2008! The last time we communicated, she was still struggling with being able to go through the stuff she had in storage. But her ability to get that house renovated was truly inspirational. She worked very hard.

Balance

10 July 2007

Isn’t balance always such a struggle? I think in my dream life I’d effortlessly balance work and play, solitude and company, relaxation and housekeeping, client time and desk time, knitting and everything else. And I’d do it with ease and grace. In my current reality, I’m feeling torn in several directions most of the time.

I’ve been fortunate to be very busy in my business lately. I worked many hours in June and July is already booked up. That’s great for my bank account. But there’s non-client work I need to do to keep my business going. There’s a house that constantly needs to be decluttered—or at least stuff put away. There are dogs that appreciate long walks and play dates. A husband to spend time with. I know my struggle for balance is not unique to me!

Today I leave for five days to work with a client in another state. We’ll be working long hours together on a big project. It’s a grubby, exhausting project. But there are a couple of great things about it for me. The first is the tremendous impact my help will have on the client’s well-being. The other is that I won’t have to think about balance. I’ll be away from home, completely focused on my client. When I’m not working, I’ll be in my hotel trying to rest. My husband will handle everything at home. I’ll have two obligations: helping my client and taking care of physical well-being.

Ignoring the need for balance certainly isn’t as healthy as actually achieving balance. But at this point, I’ll take what I can get.

Perfectionism

23 June 2007

I’m a Virgo. Well, actually, I was born on the cusp of Libra, but I’ve always identified myself as being a Virgo. Many professional organizers happen to be Virgos. If you’re in a room of professional organizers and you ask the Virgos to raise their hands, you’ll see a sea of raised hands. Most Virgos are perfectionists. Not me, though. I’m actually a “good enough” person. But many of my clients (Virgos or not) are perfectionists.

At first glance, it would seem odd that a disoriganized person would be a perfectionist. Wouldn’t a perfectionist insist on order? The trouble is that many perfectionists want to make sure they do everything right. They don’t want to get started decluttering until they know exactly how they’re going to do it. And exactly what systems will be in place to prevent the clutter from reappearing. And while they wait for the perfect plan or system to appear, clutter continues to accumulate. And then overwhelm sets in.

I try to encourage my clients to be “organized enough.” To me, that means you can find what you need when you need it. That even if a room gets messy, you can get it back in order fairly quickly.

Take, for example, storing your keys to avoid a mad key search every morning. Keys don’t have to be stored on neatly labeled hooks that would make Martha Stewart proud. They can be tossed into a bowl by the door. If you toss them into that bowl as a matter or routine and if you know to look in that bowl for your keys when you’re on the way out the door, then in my book you’re organized. And that’s a beautiful thing, even if the bowl isn’t (though it could be). Best of all, it’s fairly easy to attain.

The trouble comes when you don’t want to create a place to store your keys until you have just the right key rack. Or you don’t want to get started because your labelmaker is out of tape (or you can’t find it). Or maybe you don’t have the perfect screws to affix the key rack to the wall.

If you’re a perfectionist and you find that’s paralyzing your organizing efforts, I encourage you to let go of the perfectionism and embrace the concept of “organized enough.” Take imperfect steps toward getting organized and before you know it, you’ll have made progress that will make your life easier. Just get started!

Knitting with and for cats

7 June 2007

I adore my orange tabby cat, Joe. And he loves me. Trouble is, he often wants to love me while I’m knitting. I’ll be in my knitting spot on the couch and he’ll climb right onto my lap and start kneading my yarn. Or, worse, he’ll knead my knitting work in progress. I have a choice: I can dump him off my lap or I can put away my knitting. I’m proud to say that more than 50 percent of the time I put away my knitting.

His love of woolen knitted objects makes Joe, like most cats, a great family member to knit for. I don’t have to worry about fit or looks or a messed up pattern. If I knit something for Joe, he’ll lie on it. I even gave him what was left of my Einstein jacket after I frogged most of it.

The thing I like most to knit for cats is the fabulous Kitty Pi felted cat bed from Wendy Knits. The free pattern is here. A gallery of cats enjoying their Kitty Pis is here. I first read about the Kitty Pi a couple of years ago when one of my favorite bloggers, Crazy Aunt Purl, was making one.

The Kitty Pi is knit in the round and felted. Here’s Joe immediately after I put my first Kitty Pi, freshly completed, on the desk.

Joe immediately decided that the Kitty Pi was a great place to take a bath.

When my dear friends John and Rich got a kitty, the fabulous Emmett, I immediately went to work to make him a bed. He had the good graces to take to it immediately. Not long ago, Rich took this picture of Emmett enjoying the bed I made him.

Emmett knows that the Kitty Pi is made for sleeping!

Nothing could make a knitter more proud (or pleased).

Talk about your cash in the attic

27 May 2007

When I work with chronically disorganized clients they sometimes want to have a garage sale to get rid of some of their excess stuff and minimize the financial impact of buying things they ended up not wanting.

When I can, I try to dissuade them from having a garage sale because of the effort involved for a relatively modest monetary gain. I worry that because the task of organizing, pricing, and conducting a garage sale can be so big, overwhelm will kick in and the sale will never happen. Which means the stuff might never leave.

But there are exceptions. I worked with a client who was moving and as we decluttered her basement, we set aside items for a yard sale. This client was motivated and agreed that the items that didn’t sell after their post-move yard sale would be donated to their church’s rummage sale. She reported back that they made a tidy sum and while it was a lot of work, they found it worthwhile.

Then there’s the sale my friends had last weekend. I actually cajoled them into doing it. They collect antiques and had a lot of furniture that didn’t have a place in their spacious 1894 home. The furniture, though beautiful and valuable, was cluttering up their home. They thought they might sell it back to the auction house from which they bought it, but knew there’d be no guarantees how much they’d get for it—plus they’d have to pay a commission to the auction house.

“Let’s have a sale!” I said. “It’ll be fun!” The sad truth is that organizing a high-end garage sale is my idea of fun. The guys were game. They decided which pieces they wanted to sell, we went through the receipts for those pieces and priced them (antique-sale, not garage-sale, prices). I made attractive tags for the furniture, which I attached with ribbon. We also sold some more traditional garage-sale items, like clothings and videotapes, at garage-sale prices.

Here’s a photo of the entrance to the sale. The fact that my friends live in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century mansions might have helped allay any sticker shock—there were pieces in the sale priced higher than $1500.

The sign welcoming shoppers to the antique/garage sale

Before the sale began my friends and each I put in a sealed prediction of how much the sale would bring in. The winner won $50. Suffice it to say that my prediction of $6,250 was the winner! And I underestimated by $1,000.

This was a case where having the sale was worth the effort. We were lucky—the weather was gorgeous. We had marketed the sale as an antique/garage sale, with an emphasis on “antique” and placed an ad in the newspaper, on the email lists for my friends’ neighborhood and mine (I’m in the less-tony neighborhood a block away) and on Craiglist. We put up signs at the entrances to the neighborhood. The result was a steady, but not overwhelming, stream of people.

I still maintain that a garage sale isn’t usually worth the effort. But if you have a special collection of items that you can sell at a price they’re actually worth, it just might be worth your time.

The Wobbly Circles tote!

15 May 2007

My Wobbly Circles tote is completed and I love it! I finished seaming it on Sunday. My friend Lisa showed infinite patience in helping me with the gussets that help form the box bottom of the bag. (The tote is from the Spring 2006 issue of Interweave Knits.)

It felted really quickly—just about 20 minutes in the washing machine Sunday evening. I used Decadence bulky-weight yarn from Knit Picks, which is 100 percent superfine alpaca. When the bag came out of the washer it smelled like what I imagine wet alpacas smell like. Thankfully, that smell (which was strangely reminiscent of the smell of someone getting a permanent wave at a hair salon) wore off when the bag dried.

Without further ado, here it is. I was amazed at how much it shrunk in the felting process (but I love the size). If I’d been thinking, I’d have photographed it before felting.

The Wobbly Circles Tote in all its felted, nubby glory

I think I’ll use it as a knitting bag. I can’t take wait to take it to my knitting group to show it off on Thursday! (Our group meets from 5 to 7 on Thursdays at the Westin Hotel at 8th and Spruce in downtown St. Louis. All are welcome! Special note: We don’t meet when there’s a home baseball game.)