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    Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP: Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure
    Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP: Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure
    Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP: Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure
    Ebook222 pages2 hours

    Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP: Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure

    By Vali G. Heist and Bob Rios

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    About this ebook

    Vali G. Heist began organizing at the age of five while cleaning up her room with her older sister. She started her professional organizing business after years of being asked to organize the homes of her family and friends. Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations about your CRAP began as a collection of the organizing columns she wrote for a local newspaper. CRAP is Vali’s acronym that means Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure. The book includes numerous tips on how to organize, green ways to recycle unwanted CRAP, success stories from clients, and further ruminations about CRAP.

    Vali helps her readers explore why they have so much CRAP in their homes, why they don’t throw it out, and why they don’t want to deal with it. She provides practical, easy tips to organize the readers’ homes and help them live the life they really want. In addition, her book is chock-full of organizing resources, is fun to read, and makes a great gift for the organized person as well as the organizationally-challenged. Vali’s insight helps readers learn the difference between belongings and CRAP and empowers them to discover that less is more. Her book also proposes how to live a more ‘green’ life and help save the planet in the process. Her passion is to find simple ways to organize life at home and at work and pass them on to her readers.

    Bob Rios, of Bob Rios Visual Strategies, created unique cartoons for the book to illustrate the dilemmas many readers face as they organize and unclutter their lives. Bob is a graphic designer, website developer and of course a talented illustrator, who lives in Lebanon, Pennsylvania with his wife and five children. You’ll find his self-portrait on page 99 of the book!

    Vali wants readers to know that the goal of organizing isn’t to have a perfect, ‘Better Homes and Garden’ house (hers isn’t!), but rather to provide order to enjoy the space you have, handle the tough times with grace, and aspire to live the best life possible!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 24, 2012
    ISBN9781620957394
    Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP: Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure

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      Book preview

      Organize This! Practical Tips, Green Ideas, and Ruminations About Your CRAP - Vali G. Heist

      References

      Prologue

      A good friend once told me to write my own truth as I know it – and it’s a bonus if someone else wants to read it. I was concerned there were so many organizing books already out there but another friend told me to put my own spin on the subject. So, here’s my own truth and my own spin on organizing. Use what you can, share this book with a friend, and please send your comments and suggestions for future books. Special thanks to my editors, Sheila Checkoway and Erin Ebersole, for your special gifts and helping me say what I mean. And big thanks to Bob Rios for his unique and fun illustrations. You rock Bob!

      Six years ago I read a Redbook magazine article about a woman who started a professional organizing business and I thought I can do that! Soon after I quit my full-time job, I started my professional organizing business The Clutter Crew. A few months later I began publishing a monthly column for our local newspaper the Reading Eagle and I’ve been writing ever since.

      In addition to my column, I had an Internet radio program during which I would provide practical tips and ruminations about CRAP. CRAP is an acronym I created that stands for Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure. I used CRAP to describe the mountains of stuff retailers had for sale at Christmas, Halloween, and at any other holiday. When I started my business I realized there’s a whole lot more CRAP out there then I previously imagined and it’s not just in the stores.

      This is not another organizing book to just help you get organized. I will ruminate on why we have so much CRAP, why we don’t throw it out, why we can’t get to it, and why we don’t want to deal with it. I’ll try to answer those questions and suggest that if you organize your home even in small ways, it will change your life in big ways. This book is a culmination of my newspaper columns with additional ruminations about CRAP, personal stories, lots of ideas on how to go green with your CRAP, and client success stories to give you hope (names have been changed to protect the organizationally-challenged).

      What I knew about myself before I became a professional organizer was that I organized so I could make time to: spend time with friends and family, go forward in my career, read a good book, be spontaneous, sleep late, travel, stay up late, and handle the tough times with grace. This book will explain the meaning behind these words.

      What I didn’t know about organizing is that it isn’t just about having a ‘home’ for everything: it’s about a state of mind and a way of life. It’s not about making your home perfect because there’s no such thing as perfect (I don’t even like this word).I also found out that because Americans value CRAP and can’t stop buying CRAP, we are putting our planet at risk. Organizing is about recycling, reusing, remixing, and repurposing as a way of life for everyone, not just a few of us. By buying so much CRAP, we also are putting our monetary well-being at risk because we don’t have money for important things like education and retirement.

      Finally, what I didn’t realize when I started my business is how humbled I would be when my clients contact me. They are usually going through some kind of life transition. For some it takes a lot of courage for them to call me; sometimes after years of thinking about it. So to my clients, I thank you for entrusting me to help you with your belongings and thank you for feeding my passion. As Chris Martin, lead singer of the band Cold Play said in an interview on CBS This Morning (2011), My job is a lot of hard work, but I don’t have to work hard. Ditto for me.

      Thank you for buying my book! Here’s to you for aspiring to organize your best life. All the best,

      Vali

      Chapter 1

      What is CRAP?

      1.1

      Free your space – Free your mind

      A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

      George Carlin, comedian

      Close your eyes and picture yourself walking into a neat and organized room. How does it make you feel? I ask this question when I give workshops on organizing. I ask the participants to go on a mental journey and talk about clutter, how it affects their physical space, and how it affects their daily lives. Too much physical clutter can suck the life out of our homes and doesn’t allow us to breathe or to move forward with our lives. If we fill our lives with stuff, there’s no way anything else can come into that space. Peter Walsh, the bestselling author of It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (2007), says, If your primary relationship is with your stuff, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration, because stuff is the worst partner you can have.

      We buy stuff because it promises to bring something into our life, but a lot of stuff just ends up taking up space. I call stuff that just takes up space CRAP – Clutter that Robs Anyone of Pleasure. If you aren’t using something, it doesn’t make you happy, or doesn’t make you smile, it’s CRAP. However, CRAP is owner-specific – my CRAP isn’t necessarily CRAP to someone else. If I give my CRAP to someone else and it becomes useful or makes someone else smile, it’s not CRAP: it’s just stuff.

      Think about it – each purchase you bring through your front door has strings attached to it and demands attention.

      The word clutter comes from the old word ‘clotter’ meaning to clot or get stuck. When people have too much clutter, homes aren’t the relaxing, comfortable places they could be. Too often, stuff is taking over and we are ‘stuck’ taking care of our stuff. Think about it – each purchase you bring through your front door has strings attached to it and demands attention. It takes time to maintain it, clean it, wash it, dust it, assemble it, repair it, refill it, buy batteries for it, remember you have it, find it, find a home for it, keep track of it, polish it, paint it, freeze it, store it, fold it, file it, find a use for it, use it, iron it, wear it, dry clean it – you get the idea.

      The Quaker word ‘cumber’ is the spiritual weight of having too many material things. The physical clutter that exists in our outer world is a reflection of our inner mental world, which is often an intensely private state of being. Our homes and our private spaces both reflect and affect our emotional well-being. The goal of removing tangible clutter from our homes and our lives is to get rid of what is no longer useful, reopen the flow, stop taking care of or trying to organize CRAP, and make space for living freely and abundantly in the present.

      If you are ready to let go of your physical clutter, close your eyes and imagine walking into a neat and organized room. Feel the peace when you are surrounded only by the things you love and are able to find them!

      Let’s break it down:

      •  Walk through your home and write down how you feel. What emotions are generated when you enter your home and walk into each room? Are these emotions positive or negative?

      •  Have a dialogue with your clutter (whisper so the neighbors can’t hear) and find out why it’s still there and what you want to do about it.

      •  Set a timer for 30 minutes or use the clock app on your smartphone. When you are ready to tackle a room go through a small section of the room at a time and unclutter with reckless abandon. When time is up, set the timer for 30 more minutes if you want to keep going.

      •  Take small steps each week to slowly unearth what’s really important to you and contributes to your current life, the life of your home, and the life you want to live.

      •  Reward yourself along the way by reading a chapter in a book, watching a favorite movie, or taking a long walk with the dog (no retail therapy: that adds to the clutter).

      When you free your spaces of CRAP, you can live more in the present. Your uncluttered home becomes a place to make room for a better life – not just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. What would you like to have more room for in your life?

      Success in Action

      Amelia said she left her house early in the morning and didn’t return until it was time to go to bed because she couldn’t stand all the clutter. She would spend hours in the library and go out to eat just to avoid her apartment. I asked her what she didn’t like about each space including when she walked through the front door. Little by little we worked together to unclutter her spaces so she felt welcome when she came home and could enjoy her home on a daily basis.

      1.2

      Hoarders: Buried Alive – Too close to home?

      We tend to confuse the good life with a life of goods.

      Simon Schama, British historian

      Have you seen the show with those hoarders? As soon as someone finds out I’m a professional organizer, I get asked this question. I watch the show because it’s like a car accident – it’s hard to look away. My heart goes out to these people because the pain associated with this disorder is tremendous. Hoarders tend to be reclusive, hiding their amassed possessions from the rest of the world and even their closest friends. I think the hoarding show is so popular because it scares people. I know it’s the motivation for some of my clients to call me – they’re scared of becoming hoarders.

      If someone is truly a hoarder, he or she loses the ability to appraise the worth of things, attaches sentimental value to almost everything, and ends up getting rid of very little. In the book, Buried in Treasures: Help for Acquiring, Saving and Hoarding (2007), the authors state that for many people It took a long time for this problem to build up to its present levels, and it’s not going to get better overnight. For hoarders an emotional trigger likely started their downward spiral, and uncluttering requires a psychological component to be successful. The process of uncluttering is not easy or pleasant for a hoarder. The anxiety that results from trying to unclutter can be physically debilitating. On the other hand, the people who call me are overwhelmed by their stuff and are anxious to shed some of their belongings. They want to get rid of CRAP and they realize that their homes and their lives are filled with too much stuff and it’s getting in the way of enjoying the good life. It’s a scary, fine line between a hoarder with a disorder and ‘The Great American Consumer’ who has too much CRAP.

      It’s a scary, fine line between a hoarder with a disorder and ‘The Great American Consumer’ who has too much CRAP.

      I recommend that anyone who is a hoarder or who might be a hoarder, call a counselor who specializes in hoarding. I also recommend books and websites to help understand hoarding (see Chapter 2.3 and references). Most of us can understand how clutter might get out of control, even if it’s not at the hoarder level. We have garages with no room for cars that are filled with equipment we haven’t used in years; we have attics filled to the rafters with things we haven’t seen in years; and we have basements filled with stuff we haven’t taken the time to go through in years. It’s a scary, fine line between a hoarder with a disorder and ‘The Great American Consumer’ who has too much CRAP.

      Even as the size of the American family has shrunk, the size of a new home has grown because we are buying more and more stuff (see Chapter 8.4). In addition, the number of rented storage spaces has grown exponentially. According to the Self-Storage Association, there were 58,000 self storage facilities worldwide with $20 billion in annual revenues as of June 2011i. Many of these facilities have climate-controlled units and electronic key gates – better security than most homes. The tag line for one storage facility company is Problem Solved!, but is the problem really solved or are the decisions just put on hold?

      Traditionally, renters of storage facilities were in transition and only renting for short-term reasons: divorce or relocation; just cleaned out mom and dad’s home and didn’t know where to go with the stuff; or closed a business and had to store the inventory. But now, renters use these spaces for personal closets, garage and basement overflow, or as an extension of their homes. In some cases, renters go from one storage unit to two then three – the problem isn’t solved – it’s just put on hold. Many of these units are simply the result of delayed decision-making, and the reality is the renters can accumulate even

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