Thanks for keeping it real.

As an organizer and mom of 3 I have my days. I cannot personally keep my house completely organized 100% of the time. I air my dirty laundry on my blog as well. I will show my messy room and then what I do to fix it. It doesn’t always stay fixed either. My kids get older and their needs change. I have to change the organizing systems to meet their needs.

A life event could happen to anyone that turns everything upside down. Organizing is a process that goes on forever not “There, I am organized and it will stay like that”
You could walk into a person’s home on a bad day and things can be out of place, to not take their services based on that would be a shame. We are only human.

Jay, A financial planner could have had his account drained by a family illness or death or something else personal in nature. But if he has been taking care of you well why stop his services based on facts you do not know?

If an organizer is truly personally disorganized (and I know very few who fit this description), it indicates a lack of integrity in their work and life. But when clients ask whether my home and office are always perfect, I answer that life is messy for all of us, we all have more demands coming at us than we can comfortably handle, and professional organizers are not immune from becoming overwhelmed or overloaded from time to time. We all need a little help to stay on top of our time, paper, and stuff. Also, since opposites attract, I am sometimes forced for the sake of familial peace to live with more clutter than I would prefer — you should see our shed right now, or rather, you shouldn’t see it!

Still, I recall the old joke about the father proudly pointing to the harbor where all the successful stockbrokers kept their yachts. The young child asked innocently, “But where are the customers’ yachts?”

@Marie, I love your mom’s wise advice. Good cobblers sometimes have barefoot children, and bad stockbrokers sometimes own yachts. And excellent organizers, like Janine, sometimes have unhinged doors in their dining rooms.

@Jay, wouldn’t it make much more sense to look at the dentist’s PATIENTS’ teeth and the financial planner’s CLIENTS’ finances? I’d want to know how good a job the professionals have done for their customers. How they do things for themselves isn’t really relevant. (What dentist does his own teeth anyway?)

@Karyn, I love how you put the take-away here: “We unclutter to improve the quality of our lives, not to live up to someone else’s standards.” Thanks for that.

I’ll just add that for me, personally (like @twosandalz’s high school friends), I’m more comfortable in a home that has a little messiness going on. Perfectly tidy tends to make me itch a little. (But what really matters is how the occupant feels about his or her home.)

What I’m trying to say is, in my experience, a balanced home is often a more comfortable home not just for ourselves, but for the people who visit us too.

@Catherine Cantieri, Sorted, I am aware that organizing varies with the client, but I would guess that most people who hire a professional organizer do not want clutter.

Please note that I was very careful to say what _I_ would do. I acknowledge that I could be missing out on some great service providers.

If your job is to provide a service, you should let potential clients see your best work. If you are a professional organizer, and your home is cluttered, I would suggest that you keep potential clients from going inside your home. You do not know which potential clients will take their business elsewhere.

But you know what? It’s not perfect, but I can breathe. And, here’s the big one: I CAN SEE MY FLOOR. I don’t have to carve a path through a carpet of two-foot-high clutter in order to move about. And for whatever untidiness exists, when I have people over, they always remark on wow, you’re so ORGANIZED! — even if I have a handful of dishes waiting to be washed, or a basket of laundry waiting to be put away properly. Maybe they just like looking at my laundry.

I can’t remember where I read it (here or elsewhere), but someone once made a very good point about distinguishing between “mess” and “clutter”: “Mess” is the ordinary, temporary messiness of daily living, short term, not a chronic condition. “Clutter” is the stuff that just sits and grows “stale,” as it were, entrenching itself in unattractive globs of stuff rooted into the the living area itself.

Anyway, thanks for bringing up this excellent point: We unclutter to improve the quality of our lives, not to live up to someone else’s standards.

And as for the bad-teeth dentist well, hey, maybe he grew up with bad dietary and dental habits, so he can’t help the bad teeth he reaped, and that’s what motivated him to go into dentistry: to do good and help prevent other kids from following in his footsteps!

The event sounds wonderful. And the cake, that’s practically enough to get me to St. Louis!

Jay, your examples indicate that you think organizing is something mechanical, a set of processes that can fix a problem. But it’s actually an art form that has to be customized to each client, each situation, each style, and it has to work with everyone’s individual life. Which Janine’s solution does. Great post!