Homeandgarden: Say good-bye to clutter

That's the assessment of Kathy Waddill, a professional organizer from Orinda, Calif., who shared her thoughts on the eve of national Get Organized week, which starts Sunday.

"People can't let go of old stuff and their old life. There's a lot of grief in the piles they have sitting around. Letting go of those things is symbolic of letting go of the person you were when those things were important," she said in a telephone interview.

It may be hard for people to admit they'll never see size 8 again, or to acknowledge that their canoeing or hiking or aerobics days are over, or that they really don't want to collect stamps or baseball cards any more, or that they no longer cook big family meals. So they hang on to the clothes and the equipment and the collections and the cookware.

Or lives change: Perhaps they become ill or disabled, or perhaps they marry or have a baby. "Things that people used to be able to do to maintain organization are harder," she said.

Waddill, whose business is called the Untangled Web, talked about the underlying reasons for disarray and explained how she "reads" a space when she starts to work with a client.

When she first visits a client's home, "I'm looking at what they have lying around, what the piles are," she said. Sometimes she'll see a stereo but no place to store tapes and CDs. "Oh, they go in another room," the client says -- and that explains why they're piled in a heap and never get put away. "If they'd just move the storage right next to the space where they're being used, it would be much easier to keep things put away," she said.

Sometimes piles develop because items are en route elsewhere, or because there's no place to put them, or because the place where they're supposed to go is full of similar items. "Then weeding needs to be done," she said.

She also pays attention to "the style of the pile." Sometimes the pile is full of "nomads, things that wander around with no permanent home." A classic example: mail. "It wanders everywhere," she said. To handle the torrent of paper that comes into every household, she recommends opening the mail near a wastebasket and throwing away immediately what you know you don't want. At her house, bills go into a folder on her desk marked "Pay." Other papers that require some action but that she isn't ready to deal with yet go into a pretty basket on a certain table. These are the potential nomads that otherwise would end up on the hall table, on the dining room table, on the kitchen counter, on top of the piano, all over the house.

People become disorganized when "The form of the place doesn't support the life and the stuff," Waddill said. Typical example: You come into the house from the garage carrying your briefcase, tote, papers, groceries, etc. The only flat surface available to dump all that stuff is the kitchen counter, which is exactly the wrong place for most of it. Better: a shelf in the garage or a closet right inside the door, which you can also use as a staging area for things you intend to take out of the house on your next trip.

Or take the dining room. "Most people do not dine in the dining room. They use that flat surface in the dining room for something else: a craft place, a homework room, an office. Yet they keep thinking of it as the dining room, and that keeps them from being able to really see that the function is different, and it keeps them from being able to put the right kind of furniture there to match the function. They use it as an office, but they have no filing cabinet because "Dining rooms don't have filing cabinets.'

"So there's going to be a big mess of papers in the room. You need to get a place for your files that can be hidden or removed when you want to dine there. And you have to think of it as your office and call it the office and allow yourself to have office stuff there to support the function. The form -- a dining room -- doesn't support the function, an office."

Waddill says she asks her clients: What do you want? How do this space and these pieces of furniture support that? What do you need to change? Sometimes an office never gets used because it's dark and unfriendly. She recalled one client who hated her home office because a tall, dark filing cabinet loomed behind her as she sat at her desk. She encouraged the client to exchange the cabinet for a light-colored, low horizontal file (the kind that looks like a credenza or bookcase). That made the office much more appealing.

Another client had a big living room at the front of the house with a giant TV and a sofa drawn up in front of it for viewing. But the client admitted the family never used the room. They preferred to watch TV crowded into a little room at the back of the house that they found much cozier. "It was a public-private sort of thing," Waddill said. "The living room at the front of the house with a big window was too public for the evening relaxing, family activities that included TV."

A third client had a house that "was a disaster, and he felt he was a failure, but he was actually having a very rational response to life events," Waddill recalled. The man had recently been divorced; he moved from a large house to a small one; his industry dried up; his parents both died, bequeathing him a lot of items; and he was an inventor with lots of equipment and parts. He thought his disorganization was "a character flaw, but life had whomped him!" Waddill said.

She helped him rearrange his big, uncomfortable living room to provide intimate spaces for the activities he enjoyed. They created a comfortable place for him to sit and read the paper. He liked to entertain friends at dinner, so they made a dining area. His hobby was music, so they arranged a space for his grand piano and marimba. "All it took was two hours of rearranging," she said. "It was so much better, and sometimes that's all it takes."

Being organized "is not the same as being neat and clean," Waddill said. "You can be messy as long as it's functional and you're not wasting time."

She cited her own desk as an example: "My desk is a mess," she said cheerfully. "I'm a messy-desk person. But everything I need is right here on my desk. I can see my scissors, my tape, my stapler. I know this pile is the bills. Everything else I need is right here. It's only about half an inch deep. It's not six inches deep or heaped up in the middle."

It's possible to be a person without a lot of possessions and still be disorganized, Waddill said. "You could keep your spices in alphabetical order and still be disorganized. If you spend a lot of time trying to make things work when the same function could be achieved with a lot fewer steps, you're wasting your time."

She offered this quotation, which she attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "Time is what life is made of. If you waste your time, you waste your life."

A rhyme and a reason

Untangle the web, clean up the mess,

Clear out the clutter, lessen the stress.

Keep things where you use them, store others away,

Rearrange the furniture, make space for work/play.

Try out new ideas, use tried-and-true tricks,

Plan your space for the long haul, avoid the quick fix.

If you follow these tips, then one thing will be plain:

Untangling your web frees up space in your brain!

-- by professional organizer Kathy Waddill, quoted on her stationery

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