Peace of Mind Organizing

How working with an organizer jump starts things

1 October 2012

As I’ve written here before, I love swapping services with professional organizers. In theory, I shouldn’t need organizing help in my home, since I know what I’m doing. But in fact, bringing in a PO yields amazing results. And it’s loads of fun!

On Thursday last week, I had the distinct pleasure of having Aby Garvey, organizer extraordinaire, help me in my home. Aby had helped me organize my pantry back in 2009 and then since then has helped me in my bathroom closet. This time, she helped me declutter and organize one of my home offices.

I have two home offices. There’s the one I use to run the administrative side of my business. (I’m in it now, writing this blog post.) The other, in an adjacent room, is where I store items that go out of the house, into clients’ homes.

I first established it in 2008. (I blogged about it then.) I had a decent organizational infrastructure, but things had gotten out of control, as can happen over the course of a few years. I store more and more plastic bins, now that I’m doing more team jobs, for instance. And I just sort of dropped them in the room, rather than figuring out a better way to store them. So they just sat around looking ugly.

Here’s a before photo:

When Aby came, we started the decluttering process, which was fun and easy. Here’s the remarkable thing. Simply by her presence—without her really even saying anything—I started letting go of things that I’d been reluctant to let go of on my own. I see this with my own clients and it was really great to experience it first hand.

Aby never really had to challenge me on any of the things I wanted to keep, because there I was, willy nilly letting go of the stuff that wasn’t contributing to my life or business. With her helping me focus on this process, magical things happened.

Once the decluttering was finished, Aby helped me reorganize what was left. Aby, of course, made everything look better (Aby does everything beautifully), which I appreciate. But also I love that she really fine tuned the organizing and got me back to my organizational infrastructure.

Here’s the after photo:

I’m proud to tell clients that I use the services of professional organizers. I really think POs provide an amazing, life changing service.

Tagged with: aby garvey, decluttering, home office, professional organizer

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