Clutter busters

When it comes to getting a grip on household clutter, admitting you need professional help is just the first step. Actually making the call is much harder.

St. Albert resident Danie Branch, 36, deliberated for a year before calling in her acquaintance Shelley Sadownyk, a professional organizer.

"I was embarrassed and I didn't want her to think I was a pig," Branch says.

But Branch's Heritage Lakes home was driving her crazy — the kitchen, the bedrooms, the office — all were filled with clutter, and no matter how hard she tried, the mother of three just couldn't get it under control.

"I was just getting overwhelmed. I felt like I wanted to move out of this house because there was no room for anything," she says.

"It's not that I wasn't clean, I just couldn't get myself organized."

That's a familiar refrain for Sadownyk, who's operated a business called Smart Organizing Solutions for eight years. For $40 an hour, Sadownyk will help organize a closet, a room or an entire house.

"By the time people phone me, they're pretty much fed up, they're frustrated and they don't know where to start," Sadownyk says.

Her approach is the same for any room or space. She tackles the visible clutter first then moves on to the items that are stashed away. Working with the client, she sorts everything into four piles: items to keep in that space, items to keep elsewhere, items to donate or sell and garbage.

Once she's identified which items belong in a particular space, she'll group like things together and figure out how to make a home for everything. It's only at this point that she'll consider the purchase of organizing products, a step that most homeowners mistakenly treat as their first.

"You can't set up any systems until you sort," she says.

Sadownyk often finds the storage space she needs elsewhere in the home.

"People end up having to buy way less than they think they do," she says.

Different strokes

There's no standard way to organize a particular type of space, Sadownyk says, because different people have different styles that appeal to them. Some, like Branch, are visual and need to see things in order to find them. Others work fine with hidden storage. The key is to devise a simple system that fits the user.

"You don't want to work against people's habits. You're fighting a losing battle there," Sadownyk says.

Sadownyk recommends making full use of available vertical storage space, which can be commonly found in drawers, closets and kitchen cabinets.

She also loves any organizing product that's adjustable, because needs change over time. Items like shelving units, drawer organizers and storage racks can all be found in adjustable varieties, so they can be reconfigured, removed or used elsewhere.

"You could use it one way today but maybe in a year you'll be using it for something different," she says.

Finding a permanent home for everything you want to keep is the foundation of a good organizing system, agrees Anita Beil, who operates The Clutter Helper in St. Albert. She likes baskets and tubs as storage vessels for like items. But whatever system is in use, the most important thing is to return items to their home.

"You have to be consistent to what you're doing," she says. "It has to be in that person that they want to make that change."

Regardless of people's commitment to staying organized, life has a way of overtaking any system, so she suggests that families schedule 10 minutes a week to go around the house putting things away.

"It's very important but they have to work together," she says.

When organizing, she advises that people start in the room where they spend most of their time. For most homeowners, this is the kitchen and family room. For others, a top priority may be a home office.

Not a beauty contest

Donna Saive, of St. Albert-based Saive Time and Space, points out that organizers aren't equipped to help hoarders, people who are unable to throw things away, because these people have a mental disorder and not an organizational problem.

"That would be better to talk to a psychologist about," Saive says.

For average people, it's important not to feel inferior or intimidated by the pictures in home magazines, Saive says.

She carries around copies of Organizer magazine, whose cover is usually adorned with examples of pristine, colour co-ordinated storage bliss. These magazines are great for ideas but people shouldn't be fooled into thinking a real home has to achieve the same esthetic, Saive says.

"Having everything look all pretty, that's not even real to me. That's like airbrushing," she says. "It's more about the systems than it is about the look."

Saive is the chair of the Edmonton chapter of the Professional Organizers in Canada. In 2009 the association commissioned an online Leger poll that found that eight in 10 Canadians feel disorganized.

The poll found that 90 per cent of disorganized Canadians felt their lives were negatively impacted by their disorganization, with 43 per cent saying they felt stressed, 39 per cent saying they felt frustrated and 14 per cent feeling upset. Eleven per cent claimed that their disorganization made them feel like failures.

Those who reported the most significant negative impact were women, people under 45, working Canadians and those with children in the household.

After years of struggle, Danie Branch feels that she's gained the upper hand on her cluttered home. The kitchen counter that used to be a catchall for bills, toys and lunch pails is now a bare surface patiently awaiting its next helping of cookie dough. She feels like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders and is amazed how much more time and space she has.

"Now I feel so good," she says. "I love to have people over."