Although the phrase "spring cleaning" is used a lot, Cheryl Smith, owner of Consider It Done Transition Services , and Brandon Brooks, owner of Garage Organizers , have discovered that the desire to tidy is a fire that burns year-round.
With the holiday season fast approaching, you may need to vacate the extra guest bedroom for out-of-town visitors. You might want to donate half of your wardrobe out of good faith. Or maybe you're just looking around to see where to store all those new gifts you're about to receive.
Smith and Brooks have cleared hundreds of rooms in Indiana through their respective professional cleaning and organization companies, and both emphasize the importance of a tidy and organized space, with the cluttered area being as small as your closet or as wide as your garage.
According to Smith, redesigning the look of a room in your home can be transformative in more ways than one.
"One lady's goal was to do whatever it takes to organize a Christmas party with all her friends because she's never been able to invite people into the house. He did it last Christmas," Smith said. "It's been exciting to see how her life has changed just because she's organized and downsized her stuff."
Whether you need extra space to visit family or just think decluttering helps relieve internal stress, these professional organizers have industry secrets on how to reclaim space in your home and in your life.
Where does the chaos begin?
While your first instinct is to reorganize your entire home, Smith recommends starting with just two or three of the messiest areas, like a bedroom or a basement. In her experience, the top three places where clients need the most help when reorganizing are the kitchen, garage, and home office.
The kitchen is often the easiest to tackle first, Smith noted. Many people keep too many glasses in their cupboards or plastic fast-food paraphernalia in their drawers.
"I mean, you don't need 50 wine glasses. Some people might, but really, you're never going to use that many," Smith said. "What we find is that when you're cleaning a kitchen, three shelves open up, and then what happens is that what's on the counter now has a place to live. On a shelf."
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have remodeled their homes to create office space, which is also a magnet for clutter. The general chaos surrounding the home that Smith saw may come as a surprise.
"It's paperwork. People store files for a long time. Do you know how long you save your taxes? How long do you keep your bank records?" Smith said. they take up a lot of space. So we work with people to digitize them or make books and put them in frames.
Having spent the past year cleaning garages throughout southern Indiana, Brooks knows how easy it is to fill up a garage. For many people, garages are the common room in the home. When you have to quickly clean your house for visitors, you end up ending up a lot of that dirt in the garage. In the fog of the move, many half-full boxes are thrown into the garage and forgotten.
"Garages are everyone's business," Brooks said. "On a lot of our garages that we set up, we open the garage door and it's floor to ceiling."
Organize space: what to do and what not
A lot of the hard work that goes into cleaning is deciding which items to throw away, give away, or keep. When Smith works with a client, he gives her a little cheat sheet called 10 Questions to Ask Yourself: Have More Than One? When was the last time you used it? do you love him even more
Using this system, customers can split their items into three nice piles: yes to keep, no and throw away, and maybe a pile that they just need a little more time to think about.
When rearranging your space, Smith recommends starting small and making your "quick fixes." You can start by cleaning a drawer and a closet at the same time, so it doesn't feel like you're cleaning an entire room.
"Some people are so overwhelmed they don't know where to start. It almost helps them not even start. So we like to break it down into smaller parts and really get to those difficult parts," Smith said. "Then once they get used to it and we set the rooms up, oh my gosh, they feel so much better and energized."
Another trick is to split the time you've spent cleaning a room by setting a 15-minute timer every hour or every day, depending on how much time you devote to cleaning a room .
For large spaces like garages, Brooks recommends a quick one-day checkup to clean everything. For the first step, he recommends getting everything out of the garage and starting from there.
"Don't let things drag on and try to organize around them. Erase them on a blank slate, erase everything," Brooks explained. "I mean, we see customers who've been trying to organize and it's taken weeks and they don't even make a difference because they've got everything in a garage and they're surrounded by everything... They're not hoarding, they just move things around. But when you have everything, it's the mindset of being able to see empty space and progress.
If people expect to throw out a lot of stuff, Brooks warns against renting a dumpster, as it can cost up to $500.
"You'd better rent a 26-foot U-Haul for $39.99 a day — it lasts as long as a dumpster. If you transport it yourself, you might as well load it onto the van and tow it to the landfill. It'll save you about $300," Brooks said.
To better equip your space for remodeling, you can also use floating shelves or storage bins. Brooks said he advises almost all customers to buy inexpensive, leak-proof 27-gallon containers because they're stackable and easy to label.
Once an organizational system is in place, people need to stick to it. Smith's best advice is something to give after your bedroom makeover.
"The first thing to do in each room is a box or bag, which you call your donation box. So if you see something you need to carry, just pop it in this box, ready to go. You know how you look at things and you're like, "Oh, I should donate it." So put a donation box in every room or by the door that leads to your car for you to pick up." said Smith.
Give the gift of rearrangement this season
While many clients want to use their services for their own homes, Smith and Brooks have noticed a trend towards offering services to other people. Consider It Done Transitional services and workshop organizers offer an opportunity for someone to volunteer for their services and both found it to be very popular this season.
"It's really something that's in high demand. Everyone has some clutter," Brooks said.
With both services, the organizers offer free advice before developing a proposal. Consider that this costs about $55 an hour, while a two-car garage can be arranged at Garage Organizers for about $900-$1,200. Both professional organization services also have a consignment store where customers can sell their unnecessary items like furniture for a small profit.
"I mean, what a great gift for someone. They can call us and make an appointment to come and do the work for them," Smith said.
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