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• Approximately 47% of Americans have clutter-induced anxiety with the average person stockpiling 23 items in their home that they have absolutely no use for
• Nearly 31% currently have a broken item sitting around their home that they can't bear to throw out
• The main reason folks hold on to unnecessary items is thinking they'll end up needing those items in the “future”
• 57% keep things for sentimental reasons
• One third procrastinate throwing out items they no longer need
• 19% of Americans have been told by a friend or loved one that they're a hoarder
• Cleaning professionals say that getting rid of clutter would eliminate 40% of the house work in an average home
• 15 to 20% of Americans annual household budget is spent on buying duplicates and misplaced items related to disorganization
• Americans waste nine million hours per day searching for misplaced items

Any of these sound like you? Feel like screaming yet? 

I confess:  earrings are my jewelry weakness! 
Here’s a great way to organize, store, and easily find all your favorite earrings 
(or bracelets or necklaces- dividers come in different configurations and can be moved) 
The drawer is “soft close” and is available in several finishes.   
Lots of jewelry storage in a small, elegant space!

Interested?  Let’s talk.

Happy 2019! I'm betting that a lot of you made new year resolutions or intentions. Was one of them to “get organized”? 

Join the crowd. Next to losing weight, getting organized is one of the faves. And a new show on Netflix is going to make it easier for you: “TIDYING UP WITH MARIE KONDO” 

You HAVE to see this inspiring, practical, charming show! I can't say enough good things about Marie Kondo. If I had to pick an organizing guru, she would be it. (interesting aside: the word guru is composed of 2 syllables: “gu” meaning “darkness”, and “ru” meaning “light”, so a guru is one who leads us from darkness to light!) And Marie Kondo definitely can lead us from the darkness and despair of MESS to the light and joy of DIVINE ORDER. And you will have fun and giggles doing it! 

If you don't get Netflix or just like to learn from books, here are two of hers that I recommend: 
THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP
and
SPARK JOY- an illustrated master class on the art of organizing and tidying up

Enjoy! 

This is one rule I love! It's named after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, in 1895, noticed that 20% of one's activities will account for 80% of one's results. Or, to put it another way, 80% of your productivity tends to come from 20% of your efforts.

But closet designer and lover of organization that I am, I like to apply the Pareto Principle to one's STUFF- specifically clothes, shoes, jewelry. Basically this means we wear 20% of our clothes, shoes, jewelry 80% of the time. You know what I mean. We have our favorites that we wear over and over again, while everything else just languishes in the closet. 

Try this challenge: turn all your hangars backward on the closet clothes rods. Then when you wear something, put the hangar back the right way. At the end of six months, see how many hangars are facing the wrong way- those are the clothes you haven't worn, and probably won't! (It's a sobering experience). You can do the same for shoes. 

Halloween is over, but I'm guessing many of you still have skeletons in your closet. I'm talking about ventilated white wire shelving, which to me is totally scary! I know why it's in there. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It's common. Problem is, it looks cheap. It looks easy. It looks common. And most of the time, it's an afterthought, or not even thought about at all. Just some wire shelving hooked on the walls, with no thought to common sense design or practicality.

You deserve better. So does your home. 

I would love to explore those better possibilities with you. 

"The unexamined life is not worth living." 
-Socrates

Having been in thousands of homes as a relocation consultant, and then as a custom closet and storage designer, I am always fascinated by what people's homes reveal about them. How a person decorates, what is or isn't in the house, what is used and loved or just for display, whether there is chaos or calm or neither-the home is a mirror of the person(s} who inhabit it.

Feng Shui practitioners expand it even further and say that our homes are symbolic representations of ourselves, and in a deeper sense, are extensions of ourselves. Our homes are "templates for us", according to Denise Linn in her book "Sacred Space." Because I fancy myself an amateur therapist, I've always instinctively felt that the infrequently seen areas of our home-closets, attics, basements ­represent the hidden aspects of our psyches. The feng shui folks agree.

It makes sense that closets would represent things that are concealed, unknown, or unrecognized. We can shut the door on whatever is in there and not deal with it. Usually what we don't want to deal with is the physical clutter that has accumulated for a myriad of reasons-usually emotional or psychological in nature-unresolved relationships, fear of letting go, guilt, fear of failure or success, needing to keep people at a distance, feelings of lack ... And you thought it was just a messy closet!

According to feng shui expert, Stephanie Roberts, "When we fill our closets with clutter, we stifle our ability to be intuitive and insightful. Cluttered closets can indicate problems that you may not be consciously aware of but which impede your progress through life, work, and relationships nonetheless. Keeping the closet door closed is not an effective solution." Sooner or later, you're going to have to open that door!

When you have a cluttered attic, you may feel like you're under pressure. There is, literally, too much stuff hanging over your head! Add to that the metaphorical generational/ancestral debris represented by all the boxes and trunks. As for what's below ... it's no surprise that the basement and other below-ground storage areas are considered abodes of the subconscious.

If you have clutter in these areas-or any area-according to feng shui principles, there is a blockage of energy. Eliminate the clutter, free up the energy. Whether you give feng shui any credit or not, most of us can identify with the really good feeling we get when we clean out a drawer, a closet, a room or whatever.

So what are you waiting for? Start weeding out! You know you'll feel great afterward!  

Want an easy, inexpensive way to store/display your necklaces? Get some stick pins, a corkboard, and put it on a wall.

P.S. This would be a good time to go through your necklaces, and only choose the ones you REALLY REALLY LOVE, and wear on a regular basis. The rest, alas, should ideally be given away or sold.

I just discovered www.BeMoreWithLess.com, and had to share it with y'all. This website is the ultimate result of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2006, and the realization that “less is, indeed, more.” Courtney Carver decided to eliminate the stress of clutter in her life for health reasons, and that her totally overstuffed clothes closet could do with a bit of weeding out. So much weeding out, in fact, that only 33 items survived- that number chosen just because it “sounded challenging.” She wrote about her efforts on a blog, Project 333, which you can see on her website. Check it all out, be inspired, and perhaps make some changes if you're feeling overwhelmed by all the clothes in YOUR closet!

Well, it's spring, almost summer, and what do I see as I drive through my neighborhood on a balmy Saturday afternoon? Garage doors are up and men are in their garages: laying out their tools in a most reverent manner, moving this and that, puttering here and there, lifting weights, hanging out with friends, setting up the lawn chairs, popping open some beer, and they’re still there when I pass by again several hours later. Of course none of the guys are sitting on their lovely, expansive front porches. They’re in the garage. And the cars and/or trucks are all in the driveway.

So many of the garages I see barely have room for a vehicle- and those are double-car garages! According to the National Association of Home Builders, most new homes have two-car garages; some have three or more-car garages. So why do folks like bigger garages so much? More room for their stuff! And ironically, that “stuff”doesn't always include vehicles.

Spring cleaning garage challenge: make room for at least one car! Getting your garage organized doesn't have to be costly or stressful. Start with getting rid of stuff you haven't touched in a year: throw away, donate or recycle. Consider installing off the floor, adjustable melamine shelving for what you decide to keep. Utilize slat wall for hanging tools, storage baskets, etc. Custom cabinets work and look great too. And always think “UP” when using space. Tall shelves multiply the garage storage area.

Think about it: we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway, exposed to the elements, and we shelter a lot of useless junk in the garage. What's up with that?

Your garage deserves to be organized. And your car deserves to be in the garage!  

“Now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been…” -Rilke

For most of us, that quote stops short at “Now let us welcome the new year, full of things.” You know the “things” I’m talking about… the stuff we’ve been keeping year after year… the dishes, the tools, the clothes, the papers, the books, the CD’s, the toys, the furniture, the knick knacks that we never use, but might use “someday.” Our homes are bulging with so much of those things that some of us have to rent storage space to handle the overflow. No surprise then that one of the major resolutions we make for the new year is getting organized.

Remember when everything you owned could fit into your car or truck? Remember the feeling of freedom that went along with that? Well, we’re older now, and it takes a moving van (or two) to move our things. Before I discovered my bliss job of custom closet design, I was a relocation consultant for moving companies. I would go into people’s homes and take inventory of everything that was being moved. I saw a lot of stuff! I resolved then to keep my accumulation of things to a minimum. It’s a resolution not always easy to keep. We are, after all, a consumer society and I sometimes have to do my part!

But what if, in this new year, we put simplicity above consuming? People above things? What if we paid more attention to the present than the future or the past? What if we resolved to enjoy ourselves more in 2018, to relax more and work a bit less? What if we made having fun a higher priority than finishing our “To Do” list? (you know we never finish that list anyway!) More “being,” less “doing.” What if….?

When I was in college, I took a psych class where an assignment was to write what we wanted on our head stone. I picked this haiku by the famous Japanese poet, Basho, and I would pick it again today:

“in the midst of the plain
sings the skylark
free of all things.”

So here is the new year. 2018. A time for fresh starts and infinite possibilities. You get to choose.
Enjoy.

“Whatsoever things are true, noble, right and pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy, think on these things.” -Phil.4:8

What's going on in the world right now brings to mind the Chinese “curse”: May you live in interesting times. And it certainly has been interesting... and challenging... and a whole mess of other adjectives! We can wisely tell ourselves and each other that the only constant is change, but fact is, most of us don't like change, especially when we deem the change “bad”.

From what I see on the news, most of us appear to be anxious, depressed, very angry, but mainly FEARFUL. I read or hear a variation on this almost every day...

Well, throughout history, there have been “bad” times and “good” times, and in every case, it's all about perception- different people perceiving the same event in totally different ways. The world hasn't changed that much- it's just more in our face now, thanks to technology. But what's also in our face is a growing awareness of some very old truths; all a variation of “as a man thinketh, so he is.”

I organize and optimize space through the design of custom closet and storage systems. In these “interesting times”, when so much feels out of our control, it's gratifying for my clients to at least feel in control of their personal space. But depending on how many people share that space and other factors, the control may be temporary at best. What I know for sure (as Oprah would say)- the one thing, the only thing we can control is our thoughts. Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning, based on his experiences as a Jew in a concentration camp, tells us “the last of human freedoms” is the freedom to “choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

So that's the real challenge as I see it: minding the mind, being a good steward of that space between the ears. EVERYTHING starts there, you know. Our stuff, homes, offices, whatever- all started as a thought. Our thoughts shape not only our external world, but our internal world as well. I love to quote wiser ones than myself, and the Buddha said it well:

“The thought manifests as word. The word manifests as deed.
The deed develops into habit. The habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways with care.”

So... do your thoughts weaken or empower you? Do you gossip about how bad you “think” it is with the doom and gloomers or hang out with positive people? Do you focus on what you don't have or do you joyfully give thanks for all your blessings and create something new?

We get to choose that “last of human freedoms”. I'm reminding myself as well as you!

DEAR CLOTHES LOVER,
CONSIDER IT DONE.


DREAM CLOSETS ASHEVILLE.