Clutterama Follow-up

Now that I've quit vomiting for a few minutes (I seem to be the lucky recipient of the stomach virus going around the metro area), I wanted to write about my previously aforementioned session with Scott Roewer of Solutions By Scott. I feel awful, so my writing is clunky. Sorry. My appointment with Scott was four intense hours, and at the end of it, I wanted to collapse and felt pretty overwhelmed with all the information I took in. What's great, though, is that I am thrilled I had this appointment and definitely felt like I got my money's worth. Many things came out of the appointment, including:

1. Specific suggestions for better organizing our home and life as we live it, including a simple "active projects" organizing system for me to handle all the incoming stuff that I can't handle right away.

2. Ideas for specific rooms of the house, such as putting a 3-hole punch in my husband's man cave (aka the "music room") so he can put the pages of his song lyrics in a notebook instead of them fanning out on the floor. Scott also suggested many more hooks for cables hung out of the walking space in that room, which there isn't much of. He also suggested saving the guitar stands, which take up room on the floor, for gigs, and instead, hanging guitars on the wall.

Scott also made a good suggestion for covering the drafty vent that comes into our living room in the winter; our current solution is a towel, which, frankly, just looks really ghetto. We don't like it, but didn't have another idea in mind until now.

3. Very detailed suggestions for turning our file cabinet from the abyss that it is to a manageable system containing only information we really need to save -- which, it turns out, is actually shockingly little. Furthermore, we're ditching our desk, which takes up a lot of room to just hold stationary and clutter. Scott pointed out we can keep all of our office supplies on one small shelf.

3. Great suggestions for Web sites/applications that I've never heard of that can be integral to managing my clutter and organization problems. I plan to write a separate blog post on these once I get more adept at using them.

4. Very detailed discussions about some home projects we need to undertake to facilitate organization in our house. For example, Scott recommended installing Elfa shelving in our cellar -- our only real storage space -- to turn it into really usable, organized space instead of the disorganized clutter room that it is. I agree this is ground zero for us, and as Scott and I toured the rest of our home, I could see how so many organizational solutions came back to the cellar. Ditto with our bedroom closets, which are the achilles heels of the house. Our 100 year-old home does not have a linen closet, which we could integrate into a closet redesign. This is something we scoped out as part of our major home renovation, but we scrapped it due to budgeting. What Scott recommended was significantly cheaper and less extensive, with more focus on maximizing utility than what the general contractors suggested.

Perhaps one of the most important things I got from my session was a sense of confidence. As you can read in my last blog post about this, I was very down on myself, feeling like my organizational issues were a character defect. While I can't say that I'm not lazy, I can say that until my session with Scott, I didn't really know how to be organized. No one really taught me the advanced organizational skills  you need to successfully run a multi-person house. This alone made it worth the fee.

I have been in the middle of a severe pain flare, so use of my arms is very limited (I wrote most of this 4 weeks ago), so it sucks to not be able to implement Scott's ideas as rapidly as I was hoping for. Oh well. All in good time!