It was time to get the show on the road.
After months of devoting most of my time to raising our baby son (now a not-so-babyish 14 months old), my home office was showing some serious signs of neglect. Junk and unfiled paperwork was piling up in all the nooks and crannies of my former haven of productivity. A few spiders had taken up residence as squatters and needed some swift eviction.
I was ready to get things ship-shape and geared up for business again as a freelance writer, but I knew I would need some help to do it.
A quick search led me to Janet Felling (also known as "
The Organizing Lady") of Clare. Felling has made a living as an organizer for seven years after being laid off from Electronic Data Systems in Lansing in 2004.
Though it wasn't the best news, Felling said the layoff inspired her to look in a new direction for her career. She found inspiration in an HGTV reality show called
Mission: Organization. "I thought, 'I can do that. I've been doing that," she says.
Drawing upon her experience as an office manager, stockroom foreman, project manager, wife and mother of two, Felling saw her skills could be put to use helping to organize other peoples' cluttered spaces.
"Sometimes people don't know where to start--you can't see the forest for the trees," she says. That's where Felling shines.
Of packrats and hoarders
So as we stand in my office (which, full disclosure, I have cleaned up as best I can before she arrives in an attempt to save face), I'm feeling slightly nervous and vulnerable--I've never invited a stranger to sort through the detritus of my life before. But I have also watched the show Hoarders, and I'm fairly confident I'm not the worst packrat out there.
Felling immediately puts me at ease. "This is not bad," she says, estimating it will take us about six hours to completely organize my office and closet. "I always tell clients it's never as bad as you think it is. No matter what, I have seen worse."
The worst? A hoarding situation that involved a crew of 10, four eight-hour days and four Dumpsters.
"The dust was literally one inch thick," Felling says. "We had to wear masks. Hoarding is different from someone being disorganized--there's a whole psychological (aspect) that goes with it. People don't want to let go of things, and they don't see the mess. It's really a mental block."
Now that a
NAPO-certified professional organizer has found me innocent of hoarding, we roll up our sleeves and tackle my closet. Felling is very hands on, working with me side by side and questioning pretty much every object I own (Why is it here? What are you going to do with it? Where does it belong?) but because she doesn't really know me, as opposed to, say, a parent or spouse, the process is fairly unemotional and painless. Already we are filling up a box with items to donate, and I don't feel the slightest remorse.
Strange things trip me up, though, and Felling has tried to prepare me for this. "It can be stressful," she warns, "especially in the closet, because you have to make decisions about what to keep."
For example, I can't figure out what to do with my deceased grandma's sewing machine--my new one works better, but I just can't part with the old one--and I have no idea what to do with the box of mix tapes and letters from old boyfriends. Send them back?
Felling has good solutions for these conundrums. One is a six-month box: you seal all the items whose fate cannot be determined in a box. Write an expiration date for six months from today's date on the top. Store it in a place where you won't be liable to poke around in it, and if in six months you have not pried it open, just drop it off at your local Goodwill or Salvation Army, unopened. You won't miss it, she says.
She has many more tips, too, that she disperses throughout our time together ("I try to work myself out of a job," she explains), and she encourages her customers to hold off on buying new organizational tools or furniture until she's gotten a chance to evaluate the space. Often she will find new uses for items her clients already own, such as the non-functioning chest freezer she once repurposed into a linen organizer in someone's basement.
Before and after
I can't help but ask Felling what she gets out of dealing with other peoples' clutter--probably one of the most unsavory tasks I can imagine. "I like helping people," she says. "It actually is satisfying to me to go into a total mess and help people realize it's not a hopeless case. It's kind of a teaching (opportunity), too. I really enjoy watching the process of getting things straightened out. To me, it's fun."
After just two hours (well ahead of the allotted six hours), Felling and I have organized both my closet and office. She shows me a before photo she snapped of my closet, and I'm amazed at how much we've accomplished in that short amount of time. Felling implemented simple fixes that eluded me when it came to organization, such as putting my filing cabinet a little more within reach, and these small things have made such a difference.
And I'm already sizing up our basement for a future collaboration with The Organizing Lady.
Cynthia J. Drake is a freelance writer based in Mid Michigan.