My client has two gorgeous, huge heirloom trunks in her bedroom. They held clothing, but not well… Like I’ve said a thousand times before, “We should have taken a before shot!” You can probably imagine though what a stuffed trunk full of clothes typically looks like; Like strata, the closer to the bottom we got, the more folded (though more forgotten) items of clothing were.  She couldn’t see what she had and therefore was mostly using the top few items.

It can feel anticlimactic that the physical remains of a decades-long career sometimes fit neatly in a stack of boxes. Some of my clients have multiple boxes that they brought home on their last day of work, even if that last day was many, many years ago.

The funny thing about drawers is that some of the most (seemingly) organized homes I’ve been in still suffer from messy drawers. There have been a number of homes I’ve worked in that are so orderly to the naked eye that I wonder where the mess is.  Many years into this career, I know now that these facades indicate that we’ll be spending a lot of time organizing drawers.

Last week I had the wonderful full-circle moment of working again with my VERY first client. Mike hired me in 2001 when he saw my ad in DC’s City Paper. I had no experience as an organizer, and stated my rates at $25/room and $80/for a whole home. Mike knew a good deal when he saw it and my strategy was to get some “firsts” under my belt.

Years ago I helped a woman who could barely see the floor in her living room, bedrooms, and hallway. While sorting clothes, she shared something as she noticed it was happening.

“Kacy, everything I touch, I want to keep. Everything you touch, I want to let go of. How about you hold everything up as talk it through.”

It’s not often that I see an approach to organizing that is totally novel, but it happened when I worked in LA last fall. I helped a client organize a home office that was adjacent to her master bedroom.  As I was frittering away with supplies in the office, she was slowly covering her bed and bedroom floor in at least a dozen piles of paper, each no more than a couple inches thick.