Peace of Mind Organizing

The value of house guests

11 November 2013

My brother, Larry, is coming to visit later this month. It’ll be the first time he’s ever visited me. He lives in Australia, and his visits to the U.S. are fairly few and far between and usually restricted to Washington state, where we grew up and where our parents live. (When he visits Walla Walla, I go there too.) But this year I persuaded him to come to St. Louis before going to visit our parents.

I visited him in Australia in 2009. It was wonderful to see Larry and his family in their natural habitat and I look forward to his seeing me in mine.

My brother and me on the Sunshine Coast in Australia in 2009

I’m excited to have him come. I’m looking forward to hanging out with him and showing off my 100-year-old home. But that’s caused me to look at my house with new eyes.

It’s been 12 years since we moved back here from New York and despite the fact we have plenty of room, and that I’m a professional organizer, lots of little pockets of disorder have cropped up over the years.

As I look around, knowing that we’ll be having a guest who’s staying longer than any guest ever has, I see loads of little projects. Here’s the list:

• Put everything away after the bathroom is through being painted (by a pro)
• Declutter and organize the guest room closet
• Declutter the guest room bookshelf (there are lots of cat toys there and our cat passed away earlier this year)
• Declutter and organize the extra closet
• Organize winter accessories (need to do that anyway)
• Declutter the front hall closet
• Organize CDs
• Declutter the downstairs kitchen (we have two kitchens and the downstairs is used primarily for storage)
• Take old electronics in for recycling (or arrange a pick up)

The nice thing is that the projects are small, for the most part. I have 10 days until Larry gets here, so I need to do about one project a day.

The other nice thing is that we’ve done a lot of little projects throughout the year (like organizing the bathroom closet, the dresser, the keys and the junk drawer), so this doesn’t feel like a big crunch.

Having house guests can be so valuable for looking at your house through new eyes. (Heck, having dinner guests sometimes accomplishes that!) It be nice to have my brother around (and another guest, a mutual friend of Larry’s and ours, who is visiting for part of Larry’s visit). And it will be really nice to have accomplished these projects.

Thanks, Larry!

Tagged with: decluttering, family, guests

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