Tidying Series – Embracing the Unknown

Readers of my previous posts will likely be aware that I love tidying. Decluttering, organizing, even cleaning in those previously crowded spaces gives me a special thrill. I am, in fact, a tidying nerd.

That being said, I have not professionally worked in someone else’s home before. I’ve decluttered and organized my own space. Decluttered and organized the spaces of my family and friends. But I’ve always been very wary of creating my own organizing business. I worry that I won’t know the answer to someone’s question. I worry that my system of organization won’t work for them. I just worry, okay? Perfectionism truly is a girl’s worst enemy.

To partially remedy my fear, I began researching how other tidying “experts” did their work. This led me to some really lovely people which I’ve already written about at length here. This led me to the shocking conclusion that each person tidies differently. I know, fiends, I know. Truly high-level stuff here. But that very realization helped me understand why some people truly love and revere KonMari’s methods and others find them completely unhelpful. Those that don’t often have different brains types and different organizing needs than the people who created the methods. To conclude: the best method is the one that consistently works well for you.

Then my friend Beach Mermaid sent me a message. Would I mind coming to visit and help her declutter and organize her room?

Now first, some background on Beach Mermaid. She and I go back. Waaaaaaay back. More than thirty years even. It should probably tell you something about the both of us that Beach Mermaid’s mother brought me over to help her organize when we were in elementary school. As you might imagine, that attempt ended horribly. I liked organizing—nerd, remember?—but had no real grasp of basic concepts or best practices. Beach Mermaid was understandably irritated so I ended up doing most of the organizing myself. When I left and she tried to resume her normal life, she was completely unable to find anything. She knew where she put things. They might be in piles, but she knew which pile it was in and likely how many of the thing she had. Little me swanning in to “assist” her and literally made it into organized chaos.

Next, you need to know something about her current situation. We were roommates for three years and got along quite well. (It’s actually her fault that I came in contact with Marie Kondo’s methods in the form of a book on her bookshelf.) I built my own tidying muscles as I lived with her, and I believe I may safely speak for her when I say I was both respectful to her own items and only organized what she was willing for me to manage. She was sent overseas for a year then transferred back and began attending medical school. (She’s crazy smart, fiends.)

Currently, she lives in a rental house with anywhere between 1-3 roommates who also go to med school. Because of the way this particular school works, she will learn a module, pass a test, then be sent out to a military hospital to practice and learn from the staff there before being punted back for another round of modules. Because of this, she has lived in several different rooms in the rental house. One is a very large master bedroom complete with bathroom and two closets. The other is a small ‘office-like’ space that has no closet. She is also constantly packing and unpacking brief stays in cities all across the U.S.

But, back to me and tidying.

Beach Mermaid contacted me for help decluttering her things and organizing them since she currently had stuff in two rooms and needed to give up one room to an upcoming roommate. I was both immensely pleased that she trusted me with this project and ever so slightly terrified. I’d never done this for “real”, fiends! And I’d already caused harm to her once before in childhood!

But, once again, I decided to take the next step and said yes. I drove up Friday afternoon and spent the next several days decluttering and organizing with her. We had three main areas we’d decided to focus on: tea, walk-in closet, and cozy corner.

The Tea

Beach Mermaid is an avid tea drinker and knows all the things about all the tea brands, methods for heating water, leaves, etc. She also subscribes to several different tea companies and often gets monthly samples to try. This means that she has tea. Lots of tea. Three whole drawers in the kitchen, plus another cabinet, and a full box upstairs.

When she gave me her list of goals, I decided to focus on the teas first. Having lived with her before, I knew this was not a small task, but it was also a very defined one. Tea is tea and there are only a few extraneous items that go along with it like cloth bags for holding loose leaves. I was confident we’d be able to knock this item off the list on the very first evening I was there. Which, in turn, would give Beach Mermaid some confidence going forward.

But when we started pulling all the tea out of the 3 drawers, 1 cabinet, and 1 box from upstairs...I panicked. It was sooooooo much tea, fiends. It covered the kitchen counters. It covered the kitchen table. It covered the floor of the breakfast nook. The fact that other people needed to use this space to make and eat their food only added to my anxiety.

I, however, have an excellent game face and let none of my uncertainty show. After consulting with Beach Mermaid, we decided to divide the teas into three main categories and go from there. First, we organized the tea into those categories, separating green, white, and black teas from each other. Beach Mermaid decluttered some as we sorted. Then, based on the general amount of each type of tea, we decided to organize black tea in the biggest drawer, white tea in the second biggest drawer, and green tea in the cabinet. This gave us an obvious limit as to how many teas could be kept.

At this point there was still too much tea to fit in the drawers, so we started with the black tea, organizing it by type such as tins, long bags, and individual samples. As we did so, Beach Mermaid decluttered even more, either as she put tea into their sections or when I finished pulling a section together. I was shocked at the amount she was able to get rid of. Remember, this is a tea connoisseur we’re talking about. A person who loves trying new teas! But just because she loves tea doesn’t mean she likes all tea. Some were clearly favorites. Others left a bad taste in her mouth. Some were old enough to be expired. Using the available drawer as a limit, Beach Mermaid was able to do the tough work of decluttering by honing in on her favorites and getting rid of the rest.

Once she had decluttered her way through all the black teas, I began organizing them into the drawer while she started decluttering the next category. To keep everything visible and easy to retrieve, I was able to make use of the tea tins and boxes that we had just decluttered. How thrifty! When I was done, I brought Beach Mermaid back over to get her thoughts. Remember that debacle back in elementary school? I’d learned my lesson that my particular organizing preferences aren’t always shared by my clients. Instead, I had her run through each section and point out things she didn’t like or wouldn’t be able to keep up consistently. I had to try several different combinations before she gave her approval. And you know what? Having to readjust was okay because we both knew this wasn’t about my competency as an organizer. It was about giving my client organization that works and is maintainable in the long run.

While we were working through each tea section, I came across a very nice jar that had been gifted to Beach Mermaid from a dear friend. She loved the jar both because of its emotional connection and because of its attractive style. However, it was much too bulky to fit inside the drawers. In fact, we had three other nice-but-too-big items. So instead I turned them into functioning décor. Beach Mermaid poured her favorite tea into the jar then I tucked all four items into a corner shelf too small to be useful for anything other than knick knacks. This created a handsome (and useful!) tea display.

The Walk-in Closet

Next, we tackled the walk-in closet. It was a lovely thing with shelving on all three sides and long enough that the average male could sleep on a single inflatable mattress. (I joked that it could be my new room.) The only problem with such a large closet is the potential for clutter is just as large. The shelves were packed with clothes and the walls were stacked with bins. Bins you could barely reach because the back half of the closet floor was covered with more bins and bags.

Because it was so overwhelming, I started simply. A three-foot section of hanging clothes was on the lefthand side and within easy reach. Together, Beach Mermaid and I pulled them all off the rack and set them in a pile on her bed. Once that was done, we could see the shelf of the rack below was also covered with clothes so we grabbed those too. Then she started decluttering. Each piece of clothing was picked up and either put in a keep pile on the bed or handed to me for the Goodwill pile. Again, this was surprisingly easy as Beach Mermaid already knew where she wanted these clothes to go. She was simply sorting the ones she either didn’t like or were no longer serviceable into their requisite piles. Once finished, we picked up the keep pile and returned them to their original section. Behold! There was now more room!

This extra room allowed her to begin organizing based on fabric type and length. Let me repeat. She organized by type and length. I didn’t even get the chance to ask her how she would like them organized. She simply started sorting based on the three decades of experience she had in how she liked to arrange her clothes. Decluttering simply gave her the extra space to do so.

A note here: there are many people who do not like to take things out of a space to organize them. That is a perfectly legitimate way of organizing and is very useful if you are easily distracted by the next project and/or have constant interruptions to your day. While we both had a fair amount of disruption, my continued presence meant it was fairly easy for us to pull out a particular pile, sort, then transport it back to the closet. Also, the light in the closet was out, and it was a super unusual one that would cost a lot of money to replace. This meant that it was functionally easier to simply carry each section out rather than trying to see everything in the dim light of a flashlight.

To continue, we made our way around the closet from left to right, middle to bottom as the top had things she wasn’t ready to deal with. It took us about three days of not-continuous work to get it back into shape. When we were done, Beach Mermaid had easily definable sections. Shirts went there. Hoodies over here. Jewelry and electronic cords hung over here. Again, I did very little organizing in this closet because she already had systems in place that worked for her. They had simply become overwhelmed by the amount of things coming in and the amount of times she spent in hotels and moving between rooms. To me this was the most surprising—and the coolest—discovery while decluttering together. Beach Mermaid had little confidence in her ability to declutter and organize, but she actually already had systems in place that worked best to manage what she owned. Being able to see and recognize the systems she had built not only gave her confidence but also pride in her abilities.

The Cozy Corner

I thought about leaving this section out, but I would be remiss in not being open about how tidying actually goes. We managed to declutter and organize her tea and most of her walk-in closet, but we never got to the cozy corner. As much as I would love to do more decluttering (nerd!), I have responsibilities, and she has a life and school.

However, by decluttering with someone who supported her and helped uncover her natural organizing preferences, Beach Mermaid now has all the skills she needs to continue tidying by herself. Does this mean she’ll never call me up again? Not necessarily. Building new skills is hard, and it’s usually easier to do with a buddy. It’s also helpful if you have ADHD or any of the myriad brain patterns that contributes to easy distractability or executive dysfunction. But it does leave her with the old adage – if you declutter someone’s house, they’ll be lost in the new system. If you show someone how to declutter their own home, they’ll have skills to last a lifetime.

Key Takeaways

I imperfectly helped somebody and nothing exploded – Even though my knowledge and experience were imperfect, I was still able to help Beach Mermaid move forward in creating a space that worked for her. No perfectionism required.

Don’t Panic, Just Declutter – There is an end to stuff. Even the messiest house has physical boundaries. Often, people like me are called in exactly because the amount of objects is overwhelming. Pause. Take a deep breath. And start decluttering. Even if you only move one item at a time out of your house, progress is still being made.

Building Client Confidence – Most clients don’t have confidence in their ability to declutter and organize their things. They’ve spent a lifetime trying different systems, and while some of them work, those are often overwhelmed by systems that don’t. Clients can be self-conscious of the fact that they need to bring in someone to help them and may have trauma related to being messy and disorganized.

First of all, let’s clear the air about people who don’t organize and declutter easily. These are skills. Not being naturally inclined to these skills doesn’t make you a bad person. Being naturally inclined to these skills doesn’t make you a good person. It just makes you human.

Secondly, skills can be taught. I, myself, am not skilled at math. It’s a subjective I’ve struggled with ever since kindergarten when I came home from standardized testing and told my parents ‘wow, today’s math was so easy. It asked what 0x5 was which is obviously 5. There was a whole section of those! So easy!’ My point being, math does not come easily to me. I have to fight to learn new math-related skills. The first time I did taxes? Absolute dumpster fire. The second time I did taxes? A slightly smaller dumpster fire. But each year I learned what information to keep, things like apportioning a certain amount of money into IRAs, and how much I should prepare to pay TurboTax for assisting me through the process. Do I like to do it? No. Do I procrastinate every year? Yep. But I’m decently competent at this point.

Organizing and decluttering are like math. Everyone needs to understand the basics. If you need help with the basics, you hire a professional. Nobody should look at someone who hires a decluttering coach any differently than someone hiring a tax consultant.

I have lost track of this topic…oh yes! Building client confidence.

Beach Mermaid needed to build confidence not only in her decluttering and organizing skills, but also in the fact that she could successfully do both of those things. And despite my inner panic when I saw the mounds of tea, she was able to gain confidence as she saw herself make decluttering decisions and have veto power over my organizing suggestions. That confidence built when we headed up to her closet and tackled one section at a time. Come to find out she already had a few organizing skills under her belt! Keeping everything visual is key for Beach Mermaid, so here are a few things she has come up with to help her thrive.

1.     Hanging Jewelry Organizer – I say jewelry organizer but only one held jewelry. The other organized all her electronic cables, cords, power banks, etc. This was perfect for her because she could easily see what she had a available. It also helped her declutter duplicate electronics.

2.     Labels – Labels are Beach Mermaid’s friend. She has several large, plastic tubs she uses to tote things to her different hotel rooms and events. However, they are not clear so she can’t see what’s inside them very easily. What’s a poor mermaid to do? In an ideal world, she would replace the tubs with some that are see-through. As we do not live in an ideal world and both finances and the environment are a real thing, she uses labels instead. A good label can be anything from ‘race medical supplies’ to a brief itemized list of what a container holds.

Teachable Moments – While not having children of my own, I’ve still heard quite a bit about “teachable moments”. Those instances where X will happen and so parents have the opportunity to organically talk about X to their children. Like a child receiving money from family members so the parent walks them through the steps of getting their first bank account. Teachable moments are similar for adults except the one who is being taught can decide whether or not to apply what they’ve just learned.

While the two of us worked together, several of these moments came up naturally. When we finished the tea drawers, they were quite full but still easy to access. Cue a few hours later and Beach Mermaid receives an email from a tea company with one of her favorite teas is on sale. This was a perfect segue into the one-in one-out rule. She could absolutely buy more of her favorite tea. But! In order to fit it into the space we had just spent hours organizing, she needed to declutter an item of equal volume. Whether she decides to buy and declutter, pass until she’s out of her current stock, or buys without decluttering, she is making informed decisions based on how long it just took to declutter her tea.

Let the Client set the Pace – This can be difficult for someone like me who likes to be in control. One of the ways I like to control my environment is through efficiency. There is nothing wrong in being efficient. But sometimes I get in trouble because I want other people to be just as efficient as I think we should be. When we worked through Beach Mermaid’s possessions, we encountered quite a few distractions along the way: the only light bulb in the walk-in closet was out and irreplaceable, a cute dog walked by the window, roommates ordered sushi, roommates who were proselytized by CJ into becoming Overcooked players, etc. At times, I was tempted to chivvy everyone else away so we could start decluttering again, but I made a conscious effort to take my hands off the reins. I was here (and paid) to declutter and organize. If that meant waiting a few hours between other life stuff, then that was okay with me because it was okay with the client.

There are some caveats to this mindset. Sometimes the client trying to distract themselves because decluttering is hard. If that is the case, I suggest trying gentle persuasion/reminders about how amazing they’re doing and how important this is for their right-now lives. Not just future them. Or if a client says ‘hey, I know I’m going to get distracted by X please remind me to put it down’ then of course I’ve been given permission to nudge them towards greater efficiency. But at the end of the day, this person is another adult. What they decide to focus on is exactly what I’m going to help them with. And, strangely enough, the practice of setting down control (or perceived control) is healthy for the organizer as well. Who knew?

Let the Client set the Categories – Again, it’s easy to panic and think you have to have all the answers before you begin. This is a lie, dear fiends. As mentioned above Beach Mermaid is a tea collector and connoisseur. I like tea but am not any sort of connoisseur. How was I supposed to categorize this stuff!? So I asked Beach Mermaid.

What categories do you want to organize your tea into?

She had a nearly immediate answer: white, green, and black teas. I could absolutely help her do that. She even had specific drawers picked out to fit each category into when we were done. All I really needed to do was encourage her to keep decluttering with ‘yeah, it’s too bad this is expired’ and ‘you’re right you probably don’t need 3 types of the same tea you should pick your favorite’. With a container as her goal, it was much easier for her to let go of teas that didn’t really fit into her current preference and lifestyle.

Closing Thoughts

I went into this tidying session full of fear and self-doubt. Would I be able to make a difference? Would this be a repeat of elementary school? Would I teach her the wrong way?!

Fortunately, I left our session not only with more confidence in my own abilities to teach decluttering but also genuinely having had a wonderful experience with Beach Mermaid. She left our session with perhaps a bit less enjoyment (as she is not a tidying nerd) but with greater confidence in her own decluttering and organizing skills. I couldn’t ask for a better ending than that.