By ALISON WOOD
The front hallway is the entry to your home, a place of welcoming. But this often-cramped space can be anything but. Without organization, shoes, coats, mail and accessories can take over, making arriving or departing a frustrating experience. To create a clutter-free path to your home, Linda Chu, president of Professional Organizers in Canada, offers these tips:

Read more

Not getting enough sleep? Take stock of room you’re sleeping in
By Jennifer Brown, Special to The Star

That can start with making sure your bedroom isn’t contributing to the reasons why you find yourself laying awake at night.
Read more

By SARAH BOESVELD

Enzo Calamo is a stacker. Or he was.

The Vancouver-based marketing director for AEGON Canada says so much paper came across his desk in a single day that by week’s end he was surrounded by a fortress of teetering piles.

It was overwhelming, and ate into his productivity and that of his employees, he says.

So he made a business decision and a career investment: He hired a professional organizer.

“She came in and helped me create a filing system, and she made different piles that were more manageable. It just became much more efficient,” Mr. Calamo says.

Read more

By SUSAN SCHWARTZ

A well-organized closet can mean not only more space but also more time. If every item has a place, then we’re not wasting time hunting down wayward shoes or blouses crushed somewhere in the recesses of the inadequate storage spaces, often featuring a single pole and shelf, that many of us call our closets. Something to consider.
Read more

It may still be summer outside, but indoors it’s all about autumn: new shoes, sharpened pencils and shiny lunchkits. So to help you keep track of all this fall paraphernalia (and save time, as well), we’ve asked some of Vancouver’s professional organizers to pass along some of their top tips for the season.

Heather Knittel and Susan Borax of Good Riddance Professional Organizing Solutions has ideas to cut the crazy-making clutter:
Read more

By Lisa Murphy

Tired of kids underfoot or over-involved – say, reaching for a knife – while you make dinner? We’ve got tips and tools to keep little hands safe and busy

Kitchen design tips

1. Watch where you work. Then reorganize the kitchen accordingly, says Linda Chu, owner of Out of Chaos, a professional organizing firm in Vancouver. Store baking ingredients in a cupboard near where you roll out dough and locate knives where you chop, for instance.
Read more

1. What’s wrong with clutter?
Clutter itself is not the problem. We all have information, resources, and possessions that we accumulate for some reason or another. In the workplace there are records relating to our administrative and operational needs and information that is permanent or for reference. It can be all consuming and never ending.

You know something is wrong when the volume of your information is inhibiting your ability to access what you need in a timely manner. Critical also, is recognizing that the emotional stress and anxiety around your clutter may be affecting your performance and bottom-line.
Read more

By Rick Spencer

The disorganized pay more. Whether you run a home business or a multinational, your ability to organize yourself is crucial. Problem is, being organized comes as naturally to entrepreneurs as centering the Montreal Canadiens’ power play.

“People throw away hundreds of dollars” by losing receipts and forgetting to record potential tax deductions, laments Linda Chu, a professional organizer in Vancouver. And that doesn’t include the time you waste sorting through messy desks and impenetrable filing systems.

Mandie Crawford, a former police officer turned small-business consultant in Calgary, says running your own business is much like police work: “The job may be fun, but the paperwork will kill you if you don’t do it right.”

Read more

By STUART FOXMAN

Want to de-clutter but you just don’t know where to start? Professional organizers Linda Chu of Vancouver and Jane Woolsey of Toronto offer tips for three common problem areas – your drawers, the kitchen and, of course, the bedroom closets.

Drawers
Divide and conquer, says Chu. That means putting containers or dividers in your “junk” or desk drawers, so that everything has a place and is visible and accessible. You can get all sorts of organizational products at office supply shops, dollar stores and the like, but any plastic containers or baggies can do. As a bonus, sorting through your drawers may force you to toss some items.

For papers, Chu says, you don’t need a fancy system. Just get folders to keep papers in basic clusters, like invitations, projects, bills or receipts.

Read more

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.”
Read more

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.”

Read more

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.
Read more