Something happens when a client invites you into their home and innermost spaces. They come to trust you very quickly. Just by touching everything in a person’s closet, or cleaning out their refrigerator, or styling their bookcases, you can really discern a lot about a client the first day you meet them. It’s a sacred privilege for an organizer to have.
Your stuff is really just your story. The story of who you are, where you’ve been, and where you are going. My story began with an ice cream table. I grew up in Midland, TX, the only child of a single mother who turned our lives into a 12 season sitcom the day she moved us in with my grandparents when I was just a baby organizer. My grandfather was the athletic director of Midland I.S.D. For those of you who know West Texas football, I need say no more. Friday nights were magical. And what my grandfather could do on a football field, my grandmother could do in a four bedroom traditional. {Figuratively,…not literally}
First, she traded all the contents of our garage, minus the Oldsmobile, for one tiny ice cream table with two chairs. {see photo above}. You can see from my face that I was delighted by that decision. This move would spark my love of organizing - and ice cream - forever.
Then my grandparents converted their attached garage to a two story garage apartment for my madre and me. You can see from the photos how much I loved THAT decision. It was like living with three hilarious {and very tidy} roommates. I wish you could see the bookcase my grandparents had custom built with all its nooks and crannies to showcase my most treasured belongings. I used to sit in Mrs. Parton’s third grade classroom {second desk, middle row} and spend hours thinking about how I was going to reorganize my hope chest that day after school. And by the age of nine, I was head organizer and supervisor of our family’s resplendent harvest gold pantry.
A few years later, my grandmother would come to me with a plain wooden box - too ordinary for her - and we would spend the afternoon inlaying the top with tiny little Mexican tiles she’d echolocated at an antique shop somewhere. That box held miscellaneous trinkets over the years. It was something that NOBODY but my grandmother and I even gave a second thought about. Company came over - coaches and their wives…relatives from California…our milk man {yes, we had a milk man} - and no one ever even looked down and noticed that little box. But we knew it was there. {And my mom, too, of course. She’s part of the design lineage. She just had a day job.}
That taught me two very powerful lessons.
EVERYTHING IN YOUR HOME SHOULD BE BEAUTIFUL AND REFLECT WHO YOU ARE.
AND IT DOESN’T MATTER IF NO ONE ELSE SEES IT. YOU SEE IT.
Years later, I would go on to get my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Human Development and Family Studies from Texas Tech University. I studied to be a therapist. But here’s the thing about true organizers: we are called to organize. It’s not what we do. It’s who we are. I officially started my business in 2012. But trust me when I say I came into this world an organizer. Have you ever seen the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind? We are all kind of driven by this unspoken force. We think alphabetically, in color-order, spatially, and in terms like “facing,” “fronting,” and “straightening.” And we all come down from that butte in Wyoming knowing how to file fold a t-shirt.
PS…I’m a Golden Circle member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals {NAPO}. Golden Circle is a designation for professional organizers with an elevated level of experience. I also teach organizing classes in the extended education and Silver Frogs programs at Texas Christian University. And I write and speak on all things organizing.
Whether your project requires half a day…or a year, I promise to honor your stuff. And I promise to honor your story.
