Another Large Organizing Project

A rather large project was to organize the procedure and files for a company with self storage units.

First I went for a walk-through with a clipboard and pad of paper. I made a rough visual map of the layout of the storage units, including unit number and size. I also checked to see if each unit had a lock on it, and if it did not, I opened the unit to see if it was empty. If there were items inside, I placed a company lock on it for security purposes.

Next, I audited the rental files -- there should be one for each unit, even if one customer rented more than one. I made a cross-reference note in the file if this was the case. I created an audit label and put one on the cover of each file. The label was a checklist for what paperwork should be inside the file (signed contract, payment terms, etc.).

There were many incomplete files, so I created new standard paperwork to be used moving forward for every rental customer. I mailed these forms to customers with incomplete files (this took some time to hear back from them), and made sure the file matched the rental unit. This took me about 3 months total.

Now the process moving forward is very smooth, and in the event of a problem, all the paperwork is just a file away!

Organizing Project No. One

The first large organizing project I took on was in the Human Resources Department of a company. Their files all contained highly confidential personnel information and were in a variety of places -- filing cabinets that did not lock, random boxes shoved all over the place and stacks of papers that needed to be integrated into the filing system.

The first thing I did was have the filing cabinets relocated closer to the HR Dept. into an orderly fashion. I numbered each cabinet and tried to find a key for each lock on the cabinets. I did find several keys and tagged each one with the matching number of the cabinet; the keys were placed in a locking key box that only the HR Dept had access to.

For the cabinets that I could not find keys for, I had a mechanic rig mechanisms for each one enabling a lock to be secured onto it. Then I tagged those keys and stored them in the key cabinet.

With security now in place,I audited each cabinet's drawers to see what the contents were, and with the HR Vice President, developed a theme for each cabinet and/or drawer. Now I could start organizing and rearranging the contents of the drawers, including merging the files that were in random boxes -- about 20 of them -- into the appropriate drawers.

Themes included:
1.  Departed employee personnel files -- these hold confidential info such as social security numbers, salaries, reviews, etc. These are filed alphabetically.
2.  Workers comp files -- these were filed by year but the HR VP wanted them alphabetically, so a complete re-filing had to be completed.
3.  Applicant flow files.

Once the files were organized all in the same place, the HR Dept could easily maintain their paper flow, as well as locate very easily the files they were looking for.

Certification for Professional Organizer

In order to take the certification exam, you are required to log in 1,500 hours of paid organizing time within three years of taking the test. I have dutifully kept an Excel spreadsheet of every organizing jobs I've done. So if I am ever audited after taking the exam, I have proof of my eligibility.

I have two regular clients that I work with doing organizing on their computers. I have helped them get their files and digital photography organized, and in the process, have taught them how to achieve this organization and how to maintain it.

In the past year I also have taken on three rather large organizing jobs for a company that needed a complete audit of their processes and a complete overhaul on how to proceed in the future.  I will outline these projects in the following posts.

No More Sessions With This Client

I had several more sessions with my client, sorting through paperwork, and then weeks later, when I called my client to set up the next appointment, I got no response from either my phone message or an email.

I didn't want her to think I was hounding her, but I was concerned about my client, because we had been meeting a couple times a week for months now.

A few weeks went by, and I emailed her again, being very careful to let her know I was very concerned about her, hoped she and her family were alright, and that I hoped I hadn't done anything to upset her.

Eventually, she emailed me back, and she said that I had not done anything wrong, it had nothing to do with me, that she had something happen in her life that through her off balance. Her note said we would get back to "clutter-busting" soon. I emailed her back and said that I was here for her if she needed me and wished her well.

I never heard from her again.

Truthfully, this was very upsetting for me. I was so surprised at this sudden turn of events. In time, I let it go, but this was a client that would tell me that she wanted me to work with her for a year and then continue even that. So my mindset, my plan, was to see this job through, and I really enjoyed working with her and seeing our progress.  I know my help was appreciated, and I hope the work we did made a positive impact on her home.

Session Six

Today we spent a few hours in the second floor office, continuing to bring order to the many belongings in that room. Boxes and boxes and boxes of papers, booklets, professional items.

Our focus today was to sort through the paperwork and separate out the papers needed to do taxes.  All other papers could be boxes and brought down to the basement to be sorted at a later date.

Our focus from now on would be to sort papers in this fashion to prepare for tax time. The client had to make all decisions on paperwork, so we would select a box jam-packed with papers and start at the top, handing the paper to me and saying its category, or garbage, or shred it, etc.

This is a very exhausting process that we have to do together, and you don't see too much progress along the way.

Session Five

This day was spent on the master bedroom. As with the rest of the house, there were piles of items everywhere on the floor, on the bed and on the dressers. I noticed that the king-sized bed did not have sheets on it and deduced that my client slept on the bare mattress in the small uncluttered space.

Before we could reach the bed, we had to bring some kind of organization to the clutter on the floor to give us some working space. With a designated spot for sorting, we cleared a pathway around the bed, stacking like items together. Then we removed everything from the top of the bed -- everything. We put fresh sheets on the bed, fresh blankets and pillowcases, and I saw my client's eyes light up with pride at how nice her bed looked.

For religious reasons, we removed all of the books and the bookcase from her bedroom, just leaving one or two books she was reading on her nightstand. We moved them all around the corner to her upstairs office. Then we folded clothing and put them away in her closets, organizing as we went. We continued sorting the items on the floor and bringing them to their proper places.

For this project, the basement has been designated as the catch-all place to hold stuff as we sort. This will be the last room we really deal with.

Session Four

On this visit, we decided to tackle two rooms in the house that could be organized in one day -- the children's room and the kitchen. They were both in fairly good shape with just basic clutter on most surfaces and the floor.

In the children's room, we rearranged the beds and backboards with shelving so they faced a different direction, put on fresh sheets and then vacuumed and dusted everything. The closet had a shelf with clutter on it and so did the floor of the closet, so we emptied everything out and organized those spaces. I explained to my client that the children's room should not have any of her items in it -- ONLY those that belong to the children. So we removed all of her stuff and placed those items where they belong or temporarily in the basement.

In the kitchen I had noticed on my previous visits that both of the sinks were always full of dishes that looked like they'd been there for quite some time. I discussed with my client non-judgmentally  that it is a good practice to be sure the dishes are done every night before going to sleep. Then you wake up in the morning to a clean kitchen, and this is a great way to start a new day. So we started with the dishes, filling the dishwasher and washing the rest by hand, drying them and putting them away. We cleared off all of the counter tops and found proper cabinet space for these wayward items. We sorted through piles of papers and removed them from the kitchen. We replaced a burned-out lightbulb over the sink. In general, everything got cleaned and sorted and organized. This process was an exercise in setting an example that can be followed from now on, in an effort to keep it from becoming cluttered again.

We put away the Christmas tree on this day, too. We also folded about 6 bags of laundry.

There is nothing I won't do to help a client learn how to keep the items in their house under control. It is a daunting task for so many of us, and my goal is to teach the little steps we can all take every day to keep clutter under control. I have heard other Professional Organizers say that they don't do any cleaning. I don't know any other way to help my clients learn how to keep things clean without setting the first example. We do it together, and then I hope they do it themselves.

I suggested to my client that on my future visits, we start out with the laundry and dishes as a matter of course, and then move on from there. This sets the tone for an organized home, and my hope is that in the future, these chores will be done before my weekly visit.

Session Three

Still in PHASE ONE, our third session's goal was to tackle the home medical office where patients visit. It was cluttered, dusty, and confusing. It resides in the downstairs family room and shared space with a big screen television and futon, where the children and adults would move chairs in front of the t.v. when they wanted to watch or play video games.

I suggested to my client that we should have some kind of separation between the family portion of the room and the professional portion. We moved the futon so that it was directly facing the the t.v., with the back of the futon facing the office area. This formed a separator between the two spaces. We placed various waist-high shelf units at the back of the futon facing into the client area. Immediately, the professional space looked like a separate office space.

Now, only focusing on the professional space, we removed EVERYTHING from every shelf, wiped it clean (everything was dusty from having not been used for so long), and only placed back the items that had purpose in that space. This involved a lot of sorting and organizing (and it always looks worse before it looks better), but through this process, we were able to discard a lot of papers and remove many items that had no business being in the office. We also organized every drawer and the top surface of the huge executive desk that runs along two walls in an L-shape. At the end of the day, we had revealed a lovely, clean professional space.

The final result was an office space that a patient could walk into and feel as if they are not in someone's family room. This was a very inspiring work session!

Session Two

On our second day working together, I asked my client how she was feeling about the work we had done, and what she'd like to work on next. She was inspired! So was I. We decided on a goal to straighten out her upstairs office, which had no floor space left. There were boxes and boxes of papers, machines, photos, cords, office supplies, and just stuff in general piled on top of each other in complete disarray all over the floor -- some of it in boxes, and some of it spilled out onto the floor. The desk tops were covered with stacks of papers and misc items. There were also boxes of papers and things in the hallway leading to the office room.

There was nowhere to start but right at the doorway. We prepared ourselves with a garbage bag for anything to be disposed of and empty records storage boxes for all of the papers and other items. I call this step in the organizing process PHASE ONE, where the goal is just to get "like items" into some kind of order so we know what we have and get control back over the floor space! Exactly what we accomplished in the basement during the last session.

We sorted all papers into boxes, EXCEPT for papers that needed action right away or that had to do with taxes -- those papers were put in separate boxes. My client has an extensive collection of books, and also equipment related to her field of expertise, so we brought up some shelving from downstairs (which had to be emptied off first and then cleaned) and put it in the upstairs office to hold her equipment. All of the books were stacked in a pile until we could get to the bookcase.

There was a closet crammed full of stuff, and we sorted through that in a general manner and brought a Phase One order to its interior. We will come back to that another day and fine tune it. Today the focus was on clearing the floor in that room. It took 6 hours, but we did it.

Diary of Organizing an Entire House

I am in the process of working with a client whose entire house needs to be decluttered and organized. It is a long, slow process because there is so much stuff, there is nowhere to put anything anymore. The house is full of belongings and papers -- some rooms cannot be entered because there is no pathway left; the clutter has found its way to the door.

There is no garbage or anything dirty in this house. It is simply a case of falling by the wayside because life is too full and there aren't enough hours in the day or enough energy/inspiration to keep after it all. The owners are successful professionals and have two young pre-teenage children.

So, the first step was to stop by the house and take a brief tour of all the rooms. This was just a half-hour tour to get an assessment of the situation. Short and sweet, there were boxes of items in all rooms. A full basement room was filled with boxes of papers, toys, office supplies, emergency supplies, etc. The upstairs office could not be entered because boxes of items filled the floor in no particular order.

SESSION ONE
When I went back for our first work session, I discussed an organizing strategy carefully and nonjudgmentally with my client. I explained that in the beginning of this organizing project, we were going to have to make some very broad strokes. No details yet. First, we just needed to get things up off the floor and into boxes and then stacked into "like" piles.

We decided to start in the basement by sorting and stacking and boxing all the papers and supplies into like piles. It took 8 hours. Although the room was still filled with items, it now had order.

The other smaller job we tackled that first day was the foyer. I explained that the first thing people see when they enter the house is the foyer, so it should be clutter free. We needed to designate a new spot to keep boxes of items that are waiting to be unpacked or sent out.

I was exhausted both physically and mentally when I went home that day. My client had worked alongside me enthusiastically the entire time, and I believe we fed off each other's energy, and that's what kept us going. Stay tuned for Session 2.