C'est la vie

My favorite new books....



Ah, to live in France. In my next life for sure. In the meanwhile I will make due with this wonderful book by Vicki Archer. Vicki and her family moved to France and lived happily ever after. The photos by Carla Coulson are beyond fabulous, which led me to her book...



Carla moved to Italy and this is her story in photos and notes. Who wouldn't love this, "I dreamed I was Annie Leibovitz by day and Audrey Hepburn by night."

An old kitchen made new, the innards

When you are living in a small space, over time you bring in more and more stuff. If nothing ever gets weeded out to make room for that new stuff, then you end up with cupboards and drawers that become an unmanageable mish-mash of everything.

And because stuff is stuffed everywhere, you can't count on finding or remembering that you already have 6 cans of diced tomatoes, which leads to buying 6 more cans and having to stuff those in somewhere. The open boxes of crackers and cereals get pushed to the back of the cupboard and long forgotten. You wonder where a bowl you use to have has gone to, but you know you'd have to take the whole kitchen apart to find it, so you give up in despair.







How do you fix this and stop it from happening again? You go back to the beginning...

An old kitchen made new, back to basics

We had no choice but to completely take this kitchen apart and start from the bare bones. First we went through every cabinet and drawer and removed everything that was no longer needed, usable or wanted. (See April 3rd post)









Then we boxed everything left and moved it into another room. We hired a professional house cleaner to come in and scrub down the kitchen from top to bottom.

I worked out a placement plan, designating cabinets and drawers with what they would house. I went shopping for organizing supplies to solve certain problems and double the space and separate items so that they could be seen.

The next day, while my client was at work, I went about putting it all back together...

An old kitchen made new

Remember the hallway full of bags going off to donation? (See, April 3rd post) Well, this is the kitchen reorg portion of that project. My client lives in an older building in the East Bay. While the kitchen is certainly old and outdated by current standards, it really is rather charming. However, it was so stuffed with stuff that it was truly unusable.















So we took it down to the bare bones and had it professionally cleaned.










Then while my client was at work, I came in and put the whole kitchen back together again... please come back and see the results in my next posts.

Hoarding Study Newsletter

For those of you looking for more help on hoarding, Dr. David Tolin (who has been seen on Oprah several times) and his team, publish a quarterly newsletter. They also have a substantial website. Visit his site at: www.instituteofliving.org/ADC/compulsive_hoarding.htm

A few extra things

Over the weekend I worked with an apartment dweller in the East Bay who had accumulated "just a few extra things" over the years. In the end we sent all this stuff off to charity.

While she has struggled unsuccessfully for months to clear her apartment out, we managed this in one weekend. What was the difference? Bringing in a professional organizer who is not attached emotionally to the stuff, knows how to ask the right questions and keep the pace of clearing going.

We actually had a good time during the process and celebrated with a lovely lunch when we finished our project ahead of schedule. Stay tuned for the next phase of this project - organizing the kitchen...

TV disposal

As we gear up for the conversion to digital only TV, many people will be tossing their old tube televisions. Here's important info: don't toss that tube into the garbage. TV tubes are coded with lead and other toxic substances. Make sure to recycle those TV's. If you are in the Bay Area, go to www.unwaste.com and find a donation site near you.