Get Real: Or how the organizer took her own advice

As a professional home organizer, I often meet clients who need organizational help after some major life changes. Some of these events are positive — a new baby or a great new job, for example — and some are not — an illness or a death in the family. Good or bad, these changes often require some adjustments to the way in which we live in — and organize — our homes. And these adjustments are easier to make when we are realistic about our stuff and our time.

Recently, my family experienced its own changes. Due to some health challenges, my mom came to stay with us a few weeks ago. While she is now doing much better, we still don’t know whether this will be a short or long-term living arrangement. Either way, we have needed to do a bit of room re-shuffling in our family home in order to better manage our day-to-day living.

We have moved my mom into our master and ensuite and my dear, sweet, loving and unbelievably patient husband and I (not nearly so dear, sweet, et al) have moved into our upper level balcony/half room that until a few weeks ago served as our business-and-home office. (Picture a room that is pretty much like a balcony on the second floor that overlooks our family room on the ground level.) We have distributed our business-and-home office into our family room and basement and today our new “loft bedroom” (so dubbed by Mr. Patience) consists of a bed, dresser and one night table.

These moves gave me the chance to practice what I preach (hopefully without sounding too preachy) to my home organizing clients — the value of being realistic about what your life today should accommodate. While I am typically pretty good about letting go of stuff, losing my night table and downsizing my dresser contents from six drawers to four in our new sleeping quarters forced me (in a good way, of course) to be realistic about what I was keeping and what I was not. And the situation in general encouraged me to figure out what on my to-do list was really worth doing and what was not.

A few of my newly realized home truths, so to speak, are:

I will never be a nail gal. The drawer full of polishes, nail hardeners, files, etc., is part of my never-realized hope of having pretty hands. I got real and faced the fact that I am a bit of a nervous nail nibbler, I wash my hands something like 50 times a day and I never wear gloves to paint furniture, wash dishes, garden or handle highly corrosive material, so out went the nail gear.

My weekends deserve better. My hands-on organizing work means that I spend most of my life in t-shirts and jeans and those shirts take a beating. After I deem them no longer wearable for work, I tend to categorize them as weekend wear. While I didn’t have a large cache of such clothes, I decided that even my weekends can use a shirt that fits and is without stains, so — getting real again — out went the sub-standard shirts.

I can wait or delegate. My pre-holiday to-do list had included re-painting every room on my first floor, and, if I was lucky, even slapping up some colour in our basement. Well, a ladder incident and my mom’s health called for a re-do of the to-do’s. Mr. Patience and I managed to paint some areas ourselves (just the easy parts) and we hired a painting company (the first time we have ever done that for our own home) to do the hard-to-reach areas and the takes-more-patience-than-I-could-ever-muster dark grey room. I still have half the trim to paint (I was too cheap to pay anyone to paint those areas) and my basement is suffering from the overflow of my business-and-home office (see paragraph three), but I am happy my “let’s get real” moment meant that my walls were painted — by someone else — before we hosted Christmas dinner and that I realized that I can paint the trim and basement sometime in 2012.

Forcing myself to get real has made life a little easier for me.

Do you have any “get real” organizing successes to share?