It's okay to ask for help

Sometimes I hear from my clients things like, "I really should have been able to do this organizing project on my own," or, "I don't know why, but it's so much easier to do what I need to do with someone else here." The first statement is said apologetically, the second is said with surprise.

The truth is, that even people with good organizational skills or tendencies need guidance and help from time to time. And it's always easier to go through one's stuff when you have someone impartial there as a supportive presence.

Professional organizers often act as "body doubles," standing by while our clients sort and make decisions about things. We often say nothing, just stay and encourage with our presence. It sounds simple, but it makes a world of difference to our clients, and it isn't that easy. Energy flows between organizer and client, and the more decisions that are made about the stuff, the more energy gets used and renewed.

There's no shame in asking for help and in many ways it's a more efficient use of time, money and energy to hire someone to help you get a project finished than try to struggle through on your own and never complete the task.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Quote: Life is constant change

Karen Kingston's book Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui was the reason I got interested in organizing professionally. Here's one of my favorite quotes from that book:

Life is constant change. So when something comes into your life enjoy it, use it well, and when it is time, let it go. It is that simple. Just because you own something, it doesn't mean that you have to keep it forever. You are just a temporary custodian of many things as they pass through your life...

Everything material is merely energy in transition.

 Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

 

Display what you love

One of the great side effects of decluttering and organizing is coming across things you love but forgot you had. These are things that might not be that useful, so they've been pushed to the bottom of drawers and the back of the cupboards. These particular items can be recognized by the big smile you get on your face when you uncover them. "So that's where that was!" you'll say. Don't put these found treasures back in the drawers or cupboards, find a place to display them, where you can enjoy them and gain energy from them.

I keep this whimsical ballerina cake-topper at my desk.

It might be a stone you brought back from your camping trip to the beach or it might be a particularly lovely framed photo that you took down to dust and never put back again. Don't be afraid to display and enjoy your possessions. By the way, if you aren't using or enjoying something you find pushed the back of a closet, perhaps it's a candidate for donation or recycling.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Resolution in progress

One of my 2010 resolutions was to "refresh my apartment by de-cluttering and rearranging the space." As a professional organizer, I naturally go through my life enacting those organizing principles that I find to be the most helpful, so my apartment wasn't a complete disaster area, but, after having lived in the same one bedroom townhouse for four and half years without significantly changing the layout of the furniture or the storage spaces, it was time to shuffle things around to refresh the space and the energy within it. Luckily, my fiance was even more gung-ho about this project than I was (always good to have help keeping you on track), and we spent a good portion of each night of the last week taking things off of shelves and out of closets, vacuuming and cleaning an embarrassing amount of dust, dragging furniture up and down the stairs, and then putting everything back together again. We still have some refining to do; for instance, there's a large pile of stuff to be gotten rid of in the new space between the car collection case and the coffee table, but we've made a lot of progress. Here's a few photos to show you the before and after:

The plan.

Where did all the books go?

Oh. There.

And there.

The new space under the stairs.

What's awesome about this process is we knew that if we changed our spaces, purged them of stuff we didn't need, cleaned them up, set them up in a new configuration, that we'd be giving ourselves a new way to live our lives. (Moving the television set from across from our bed upstairs to across from our couch downstairs was a big change.) But I didn't count on how much just sitting down at my desk, which is now across from the kitchen and gets tons of natural light from our main window, would feel completely different, as if I'd not only changed the direction my computer faces, but I'd changed the direction of my entire life. 


I suppose in a time of a transition (I'm getting married in a few weeks), things can feel somehow more difficult and more important. As Julie Morgenstern says, "Every time we go through a major change, we experience a breakdown in our organizational systems." I'm hoping to ease that breakdown by navigating this time in my life with the knowledge that my systems are flexible, and change is good.