The Organized Home: "Don't worry......."

This morning I had the pleasure of working with my friend Stephanie. When I was so quick to start pulling things from her drawers and cabinets she said, in a nervous and suprised sounding voice "OH.....here we go...." to which I responded "don't worry........". I could tell that it the experience was initially a little uncomfortable, after all, I was going through, seeing and sorting all of her stuff and/or junk and/or trash and/or the random items that always find their way into drawers and cabinets and you wonder how or why but you NEVER expect that anyone ELSE will see the randomness. But, remember, we ALL have stuff, junk, trash and randomness.

I realize that it is hard to let go. How hard it would be to watch someone literally pull apart your private life, but every client that I work with will have my word that I will hold any and all information that I may be privy to, while working with a client, confidential. Trust and Honesty are very, very important to me. And equally as important to me is that after I have pulled your life all apart, I put it back together for or with you so that it can be more peaceful or more harmonious or a little less chaotic.

As the morning went on we got into a groove and had a great time! Stephanie worked right along with me and sifted through papers etc while I contined to pull things out and make sense of what was there and how it should go back. This project is unique because it is a WHOLE HOUSE project that will probably take 2 or 3 phases. Phase 1, which we started today, is 6 days varying from 3 hours to 8 hours a day. Because it is a whole house project we are working multiple rooms at once. It is exciting to start a project like this. We made tremendous progress today. We have our work cut out for us but when we are done there will be systems in place that the entire family can use AND there will be increased peace and harmony which is a benefit any way you slice it!

We started in her home office.

Overall After

I put everything away and hid what we still have to sort through. :-)

The breakfast bar is really more like "command central" and it will get cluttered again becuase that is what happens in a busy household. The trick, however, is to have the systems in place to try and keep the clutter to a minimum. This little picture here is of the top of the breakfast in the kitchen.

"Houston, we have a problem"

Ahhhhhh, all clean now!

I love the "stationary caddy". I created this for my sister-in-law too. It is so much easier and certainly more efficient and takes up WAY less room if you just put all of the note cards in one easy to grab box and throw all the individual boxes away. Same goes for the "envelope caddy". How did I get so smart!?

And finally I want to share what we did with the principal desk space. Stephanie has a laptop that she primarily uses from the island in the kitchen. However, the computer here is where she prints from and it is the computer that the younger girls use. I think it might also have iTunes on it (very important). Anywho, I wanted to clear off the top of the desk and under the desk and knew how we could do it. Here is the result: