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Sunday, April 14, 2002

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

This spring, Gwendolyne Wood found herself, as more and more of us are, in a real mess.

Madeleine Hershey, left, the self-described "Space Queen," works with Gwendolyne Wood to clear rarely used items from the laundry room and move them to "deep" storage elsewhere in Wood's Wilkins home. "You always want to do the deep stuff first because then it's out of the way." (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette) Related articles: Ready, set, clean You have questions, they have answers Bring order to your home

How she got there may be unique to her, but her predicament is increasingly common: She was being stymied by stuff. Crushed under clutter. Berated by the boxes and furniture and all the other unfinished business that so completely filled the garage of her Wilkins house that she couldn't see, much less get to, the back of it. Yet she had to sort it sometime, deal with it somehow, and move it somewhere.

She was, in short, agonizing over organizing.

Then to her rescue came the Space Queen.

The Space Queen is the tongue-in-cheek handle that Madeleine Hershey goes by for her Swissvale-based business as a "professional organizer."

Yes, there is such a thing, and not just on the wacky West Coast. This region has 10 other practicing pros who meet monthly as the Pittsburgh Professional Organizers, and who all have their own styles and specialties ranging from growing corporations to the downsizing elderly.

For people as overwhelmed as Wood, they can be superheroes. Not even the Space Queen pledges to bring order to the universe, but she does in her brochure offer hands-on and other help "so you can create a fulfillable and sustainable vision for your universe."

She arrives on the scene with trash bags. A roll of white ones and a roll of bigger green ones. These she pulls from a black kit bag -- a neatly organized one, it should go without saying -- also holding packing tape, a label maker, gloves and a fluorescent green measuring tape. Other tools of her trade include a camera, for before-and-after shots, though "Not everyone likes those."

Wood is fine with photos, but she's worked with the Space Queen before: Hershey helped set up a system by which Wood could balance her own checkbook, one of her troublesome tasks before she was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Wood manages fine, and in fact manages the office of the associate provost for academic affairs at Carnegie Mellon University. But ADD means she requires assistance setting up systems, such as the one friends helped her painstakingly create for her basement storage room, with packing lists for each small box of like items.

That's why she was so doubly devastated when a failed water heater flooded that storage room. Alas, the disaster restoration company that dried out her belongings created more disaster for her by returning everything to her garage all mixed together in 75 new boxes.

It was, combined with the lingering disarray in her basement and laundry room, a "nightmare."

On the recent Saturday when she and Hershey start to face it, Wood manages to joke -- "Did I tell you I have a lot of stuff?" -- but she looks more as if she might cry. Hershey, who has rolled up not only her sleeves but also her pant cuffs, stays upbeat, but doesn't sugarcoat it:

"Any organizing job gets five times worse before it gets better."

That there are more professional organizers than ever says something about the world.

It's messed up.

Karen Alberts, a part-time nurse, full-time homemaker and overtime mother of three boys, got help from professional organizer Leslie McKee in creating storage space on a landing at the side door of her Mt. Lebanon home. The new installation solves what Alberts calls a front door "flow problem" for her family, including Joshua, 7. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

Especially here in the Land o' Plenty, many of us bury ourselves alive in STUFF. The paperless society? Those predictions are crushed beneath piles of papers that hide the few that we need. And we're buffeted by blizzards of other information, from catalogs to voice- and e-mails that never seem to stop. We can't find time to do all that should be done. We can't find anything.

"I would say a lot of people are a mess out there," says Hershey, who, having gone pro last year, is one of the newest organizers in town. She was inspired by reading about one of the first here, Sylvia Jessy, who started her business a decade ago and later self-published a paperback help book with the same title as the business:

"Organized Chaos."

The self-described "grandmother" of area chaos busters, Jessy has been around long enough to be joined in the Yellow Pages by other "Organizing Svces." She's soon moving to North Carolina, but she says, "I think it's finally hit Pittsburgh," where people are "more open to the idea of hiring someone to help them get past this issue."

The ranks of organizers are rising everywhere: The Austin, Texas-based National Association of Professional Organizers, started in 1985, has grown from a few hundred members in the early 1990s to more than 1,600 around the globe today.

Its president, Stephanie Denton of Cincinnati, says, "People simply have more things to manage." And increasingly, even if they don't call a professional for help, they yearn to learn how to manage their home and work lives better.

Hence the continuing appeal of celebrity organizers such as Julie Morgenstern, a regular on "Oprah," and books such as "Simplify Your Life," even non-stuffy groups such as Messies Anonymous, which offers its own 12-step program.

Still, somewhere, unread "Real Simple" magazines are covering up unused coffee tables. Who has time to sit down with a mug and read? Who actually uses a dining room table for dining?

That's where a pro can help, says Denton, who likens hiring an organizer to hiring a financial planner: Both can save you time and tension and, yes, money.

Think of late fees for everything from bills to rental videos. Denton frequently gets cries for help from folks fed up with not being able to find the thing they need and having to buy another one. Or, if only they could find the warranty or receipt for the thing that broke. "Or they buy things that they don't even remember that they did have."

The big bugaboos are paper, general clutter and closets. Hence, the proliferation of California and other closet companies with cute names such as Contain-It and Closet-Tier. Steve Stapel's year-old Bellevue business, Organize-IT, specializes in cabinets specifically for grubby garages, which he estimates is 99 percent of them ("so I figure I have a pretty good market out there"). Home offices and basements tend to be hot zones, too.

But the real issues go even deeper: People want more time with their families. They want their homes to be comfy havens. They want uncluttered minds.

"Now I'm getting, 'How do I stay in balance?'" says Jessy, who says she's evolved into more of a "holistic organizer and coach." New Agey, perhaps. But if you have any doubt that this stuff can be serious, talk with her how sensitive clients can be about their disorder ("It's like bringing up someone's weight") and about how it can be entangled with other problems.

"I would love to see a study," she muses, "on the number of people who are divorced because of organizing."

Access the organizer gene

How can you find order amid the chaos? And what better time than spring, and Stress Awareness Month, and just before April 21-27, National Organize Your Files Week?

Organizers are guarded about client confidentiality (Jessy: "All the things they've hid from everybody in the universe, we get to see it"). But they're generous with general advice. For instance, Denton suggests that even those who don't run a business at home set up an "office" for running their home like a business.

"People have designated places to cook, eat, sleep, but not always a designated place to handle paperwork," she says, using that extra common-sense gene that organizers seem to be born with.

Of course, it's not common sense, and everybody's situation is different. Organizers earn their hourly rate -- $40 to $85 for residential jobs and up to twice that for business and corporate work -- by creating specific solutions and systems that their clients can work with and that work for them and their spaces.

Hershey, a k a the Space Queen, begins with Wood by asking what she envisions for her basement and other storage areas.

Then, before touching anything in the jam-packed garage, she works with Wood and her boyfriend, Mark Kelly, to prepare space elsewhere. They create a worse mess by emptying an under-the-stairs closet of everything from a box of board games to a gas mask.

Hershey: "What's this?"

Wood: "I've never known what it is. It used to belong to my great-grandmother." (Demonstrates how wood contraption unfolds into a table base.)

Kelly (who defines his own organizing style as "Dumpster") wisely says nothing. But Hershey stays focused: "Are you going to find a use for this in the next six months?"

Wood agrees to move it to really "deep storage" -- in the attic.

Thus, Hershey strives to find appropriate homes for things to "live" -- deep in the back of the closet if rarely used, and right in front if needed regularly and/or soon.

There always are the trash bags, too, but Hershey knows how hard it is for lots of people to throw anything away. She doesn't force them.

Just deciding on a home for each kept item can be agonizing enough, and indeed, Wood at one point flees upstairs for a time-out.

But by the end of the first three-hour session, they've repacked that closet with even more stuff, and in a neat way that allows Wood to get to all of it. They've thrown out some things, and created piles to go to a friend and other destinations. Best, they've opened enough space in the garage that they both can walk in.

"Look! I can get to my garden tools!" Wood says with a smile that wouldn't have fit in there before. "Cool!"

Taming clutter

The two of them made even more progress in a second session, and they'll continue in a third session tomorrow night. "It's like, OK, it's a complete utter disaster; however the disaster is in the right places," Wood says with a laugh. She is seeing the light at the end of the garage, so to speak, and knows she couldn't do it without Hershey's objective and efficient help. "I don't have the time or expertise to sort this out."

That job gives just a taste of the kinds of organizing jobs and organizers out there.

Hershey does this only part time -- she also works as a massage therapist -- and doesn't belong to NAPO, though she does belong to the Pittsburgh Professional Organizers. Her car's license plate reads "MADWOMN."

At the other end of the spectrum is the up-to-70-hours-a-week organizer who organized the PPO: Patty Kreamer, who recently changed the name of her business from Time Finders to Kreamer Connect Inc. As you can see from her Web site, www.kreamerconnect.com, she offers a wide range of services, customized seminars, even a free monthly newsletter and a $49.99 hard product -- a "tickler file" for the timely processing of paper.

"I don't have any cookie-cutter solutions," she says. "Everybody I work with is different."

Yes, she is a neatnik, which you can't help but admire and, well, hate as you walk through her immaculately spare home in Scott. Even the books on the shelves seem to match. The upside-down ones are that way on purpose: Those are the ones she's read. The empty dust jackets hold space for books she's loaned out. But she has all the books listed on her computer, alphabetically by author.

"People who do this are usually naturally gifted at organizing," she says. "All their lives they've done this. Now they realize they can make a profit at it."

She's putting the finishing touches on her own how-to book, "But I Might Need It Someday," in which she'll share some of her organizing truisms such as "Being organized does not mean neat. Being organized means being able to find something in a reasonable amount of time."

	Karen Alberts of Mt. Lebanon, mother of three boys, looks to Leslie McKee, left, for her expertise as a professional organizer. "I don't apologize for having boys and being busy and having stuff, "Alberts says. "I just want a place for it where we can all find it." (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

As for her own history, she laughs and says, "I never, ever in my life was told to go clean my room." She used her neat knack to streamline offices and procedures at other jobs she had in marketing before going out on her own in 1999.

In addition to "Top 10" tips, her site includes glowing testimonials to her efficiency from named business people in the area. She says many clients have "little Patties sitting on their shoulders."

One of them is Cindy Perich, a headhunter with Basilone-Oliver Executive & Technical Search in Ross. She invited Kreamer into her paper-piled cubicle about a year and a half ago, and has been amazed at how much she's benefited from such basic advice, as "handle a piece of paper only once." In fact, some of Kreamer's systems were standardized throughout the office, and Perich even found herself applying them at home.

Then, at a recent networking social, Perich ran into her organizer, felt a pang of guilt and blurted out, "I fell off the wagon!" Kreamer understood. Perich went home and spent the night organizing a box of paperwork, even went in to work that Saturday to organize some more, then called Kreamer to say, "I just want you to know what a powerful influence you have on my life."

Kreamer loves it when clients say: "'I can go to my kids' baseball games.' 'I can have visitors now.' ... Those are the results you get."

All the more gratifying when you consider how many people approach getting organized: "They'd rather have a sharp stick in the eye than do it."

Some of the other local organizers might not like that there isn't room in this article to, well, neatly fit them all in. But the PPO seems unusually non-stabbing for a group of people in the same business: They share not only strategies and other information, but also referrals, which come in through NAPO.

The member who now doles those out is Mt. Lebanon organizer Leslie McKee, who calls her part-time business "Organize ME."

She admits that she's not perfectly organized (and jokes about how merciless her "friends" can be should she forget anything).

But then, most people don't want perfect order, anyway. Just a little more order.

Or, in Karen Alberts' case, "I don't want people to kill themselves coming in my front door."

A friend and neighbor of McKee's, Alberts embraces the chaos that comes with having three boys, a husband, two dogs, a bird and hermit crabs. Considering, she seems amazingly organized ("Everyone knows the library books go next to the crab").

But her sons -- ages 10, 9 and 7 -- come with a lot of stuff, especially when they burst in the front door after school and pile their backpacks and shoes in the entryway. They're involved in so many different sports that she has to have her own gear bags for each activity, plus all the gear bags for the teams that she or her husband coach (she's taking Pinto League baseball this spring).

"We're trying to fit our lifestyle into a 1916 house," she sagely quips.

So she came to McKee for help in transforming a little-used side entrance and landing into the new main decontamination chamber for the boys, with hooks and shelves and cubicles.

McKee based the design on Alberts' answers to questions she asked during a session where they joked that the new after-school scenario would include the boys shouting "I love you, my Mommy" while birds tied ribbons in her hair.

But Alberts will be thrilled if all the males use the new landing storage system, which McKee's husband built and they installed last Sunday.

She's not worried about them forgetting and reverting to the front door, because, as a mom, she has her own expert ways of achieving her desired functional "flow":

"I'll lock the door!"