By Jennifer Brown – Special to the Star

Living in a small space can sometimes feel like the walls are closing in – especially if you’re someone who tends to collect clutter rather than cull along the way.

And while rental storage units are popping up across the country to accommodate all the material goods Canadians have collected or inherited, throwing your stuff in storage won’t win the battle over clutter, says Linda Chu of the Professional Organizers in Canada.

“Putting your stuff in storage isn’t the first step people should take. You must purge and keep only specific things you use a lot and evaluate furniture items that may have a multiple purpose,” says Chu. “There are many items now on the market, such as ottomans that double as storage devices.”
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By Katherine Gibson

Declutter your closets

My friend Maggie is a hoarder. Her tiny Winnipeg bungalow is filled to the rafters with every homemade card, piece of art and dollar-store gift her children ever gave to her. Now the kids are gone, and Maggie is selling the house. But the prospect of dealing with the massive clutter is overwhelming. She feels paralyzed by inertia. “I’m buried by my debris,” she says tearfully. “It’s sabotaging my life.”

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By SUSAN SCHWARTZ

Ingrid Ulrich is the kind of person who is irritated by messiness; clutter stresses her out. When the only place for the chartered accountant to hang clothes she’d selected to wear to work the following day was from a knob on her husband’s dresser, it drove her nuts. When her husband, banker Ron Handfield, would empty his pockets on the dresser at the end of the work day, that bugged her, too. So did having to hunt for shoes under her suits in the reach-in closet in the Beaconsfield couple’s master bedroom – a closet hung with two sagging poles.

A custom-designed closet, where everything would have its place, had long been on her wish list. It became a reality when the couple and their three young children moved recently to a larger home with a good-size walk-in closet off the master bedroom. They dismantled the makeshift poles and shelves left by the previous owners, and painted. Then Ulrich called in California Closets, a company that creates custom closets.
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By Jacqueline Nunes

Here’s some news. Are you sitting down — away from your computer? Every day, 183 billion e-mails are sent worldwide, landing in the inboxes of 1.1 billion users. For many people with an e-mail account, that translates into 166 e-mails popping up daily. If they ignore their e-mail for a week, they’ve suddenly got 1,162 messages clogging their inbox. What happens if they let things slide for an entire month? “I’ve seen upwards of 5,000 e-mails in an inbox at one time,” says Krista Green, a Vancouver-based professional organizer. If you’re having trouble breathing, you’re not alone. Out-of-control inboxes may induce stress and anxiety, but they’re also fixable. So swivel your chair over and boot ‘er up. Here’s how to approach the onslaught, and beat it.
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Step one: Take Inventory

SOON YOU WILL experience them: the fresh air, bright spaces, movement and activity you so fondly associate with springtime. This is, until you dive into your garage or basement searching for your bicycle and gardening supplies. That’s when it’ll hit you, that overwhelming feeling of anxiety in your chest, having to deal with all those piles that you have deferred to ‘later’ over the winter, the fall, the summer, the spring (okay, it’s really been years).
You may not be dealing with a mountain of possession. And it may very simply be one room – your pantry or your spare room – but the anxiety in having to look for something amidst a mess is not less intense. How many of you find it easier to just go out and re-purchase something you know you already have? Take for instance, light bulbs, batteries or yet another flat of tomato paste.

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By Julie Crawford

SPRING is sprung, the grass is ris: I wonder where my cell phone is?

Ah, spring! That season where things bloom and multiply, including the piles of papers, fliers and laundry in my home. My life is a daily treasure-hunt for those dastardly keys, notebook and wallet, all of which like to burrow underneath the piles of stuff I’ve acquired.
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By Mike Chouinard

For many, the thought of dealing with cluttered rooms at home or the piling system on their desks at work can become too much.

The end result is more mess, and thus the cycle continues.

To help people turn some of this chaos into order, speaker Linda Chu will be giving people a hands-on look at ways to clean things up. Her free “Out of Chaos” presentation takes place at the public library in Chilliwack Thursday night at 7 p.m.
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By Jeani Read

Clutter consulting: fun or frantic?

“Absolutely the most fun I’ve had in any job. There’s always an element of frantic, since when you’re working with people, it’s always unpredictable.”

Longtime plan?

“I was in the hospitality industry for 20 years and loved it. You never know what’s going to happen. In a hotel, somebody could be trying to commit suicide in one room and Janet Jackson could need something in another room. When I started my new business I tried to figure out what I loved about my old business. It was dealing with people and organizing processes.”
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By Michael Kissinger, The Back Page

Linda Chu is one organized woman. How organized? For starters, she has a box in her fastidiously tidy Granville Street office that’s labelled “Broken Picture Frames”-whereas most people, like me, would toss such things in the garbage or under a bed or in a drawer so they can gather dust, fester and eventually become a point of contention and endless source of arguments with their significant other.
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By Jessica Werb

The truth is, most of us could use a little help in the organization department. How else to explain the growing popularity of TV shows like How Clean is Your House? and Clean Sweep, and the increasing numbers of professional organizers in the Yellow Pages? Here is what the pros have to say about how to get your work life in order.

YOUR DESK
According to Sherry Borsheim, organizing guru at Simply Productive, your desk is not a storage area; it’s a “command centre.” That means what you don’t need at your fingertips shouldn’t be sitting on it. Rowena List, professional organizer and president of Getting it Together, recommends having only the basics on hand; your telephone, computer, in and out trays and whatever you’re currently working on. “People have a tendency to just pile things,” List observes. “They need a system: deal with it, dump it or delegate it.”
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By Laura Thompson

What do domestic gods and goddesses do to spruce up their surrounding in spring-time? Reporter Laura Thompson asked a few.

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By Lisa Jorgensen

While many people are overwhelmed with the prospect of organizing a cluttered space and rarely have the time to tackle clutter, a “quick start plan” is a way to slowly clean up around the home and office, professional organizer Linda Chu says.

Before getting started, set a reward.

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