A pro shares the inner secrets of a well-organized home
One needs courage and more than a little trust to let an outsider come into one’s home to rifle through personal belongings with the goal of streamlining the homestead for its greater good. To most of us, that sounds like about as much fun as a full body wax.
That’s why Jennifer Mc- Carthy, of Lake Oswego, Oregon, did what any brave, motivated woman would do. She had a professional organizer start in her husband’s home office.
The office lay somewhere beneath piles of papers. “He has never been any good at filing,” McCarthy said of her husband, an instructor of graduate business classes at a local university, who welcomed the help. “He has to see what needs to be done, and that won’t happen if papers are tucked in a file drawer.”
Enter Danielle Tanner Liu, a certified professional organizer and owner of Totally Orderly. She understands the outof-sight,-out-of-mind mentality, so she worked with his style and created a cubby system for mail and papers that he could see into. Anything to do with his rental properties went into one cubby, papers related to his work with the Cub Scouts in another, bills to pay in another and so on.
“He could see it all from his desk, but it was off his desk,” McCarthy said. “It was ingenious.”
And the trust built from there. Next, Liu helped McCarthy organize her kitchen, then her daughters’ closets. Today, three moves and 15 years later, Liu has made almost every area of the McCarthy home function better.
“A little chaos is OK for a while, but I cannot live in clutter,” said McCarthy, 61, who works part time at a local high school. “Things have to be in place, or I cannot do my everyday life.”
As their three kids began moving out, the couple downsized from a 4,800-square-foot house to 3,100 square feet, then to a 2,500-square-foot house they built. “Dani helped me think ahead and visualize what would go where,” McCarthy said, “and to see that if we were going to have only so much room for pots, some must go.”
Along the way, Liu also helped McCarthy’s husband, at his invitation, pare 30 boxes of memorabilia, including a box of about 25 baseballs, down to four boxes and one baseball.
“He and I had some epic sessions,” said Liu, a board member of the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals and president of its board of certification program.
“Dani understands the issues people have with their stuff,” McCarthy said. “The work is much more emotional and psychological than you think. A good organizer helps keep the clutter down, too, because the whole family knows where stuff goes.”
In a family home, that is the key to ending clutter: Everything has a place that makes sense, and everyone knows where that place is and puts stuff there.
“In other words,” I said, to make sure I’ve heard correctly: “The linen closet has just linens, not dog toys?”
Jeanann McCoy, another longtime client of Liu’s and mother of six, concurred: “The house stays neat because everybody knows where everything belongs. Once things have a place that makes sense, they tend to get back there and stay there.”
“This isn’t rocket science,” Liu said, “but there is a science to it. Because people who live together connect to things in different ways, the process involves knowing those differences and creating systems that become habits the whole family will adhere to.”
Notably, neither of these women had messy homes to start with, Liu said, but clean does not always mean organized.
Join me next week when I hire a professional organizer for my own home.