Waxed Out

Can’t get enough of them. Candles make for wonderful decorative accents. They can create atmosphere, change the mood or facilitate fantasy. A bedroom transforms itself to a boudoir. A bathroom becomes a Roman spa with 20 or 30 glowing cylinders.

Be honest. How many candles do you think you own? Don’t forget those itty-bitty tea lights that are purchased by the hundred, the tapers, birthdays, pillars, Chanukahs, votives globes, the scented and the fragrance-free. Then think of all the accessories designed to display them.- candelabras, hurricane lamps, candle sticks and hanging lanterns for the garden, to name a few. Ca-ching, Ca-ching! No wonder they are the darlings of the home party circuit. Who can resist all of that warmth and beauty, not to mention the irresistable twinkle? Don’t tell us that you don’t stock up on them when they are on sale at the outlet malls. The candle matter is not simply another case of wretched excess, although for the hard-core candleholics it is. We continue to be confounded by their apparent obligation to hoard those faded peach coloured tapered candles from the 80's that don't even match their decor any longer. However, our beef resides with those who inexplicably cling to the half-melted specimen. Nothing is as unattractive as a coagulated pool of liquefied paraffin topped off with a charred wick that has managed to unite permanently with its holder, now glued to your coffee table. Let's face it, candle burning is inherently messy. If you manage to dig out the residue, are you holding on to the stunted remnants to get you through a major power failure?

Challenge
Give some thought to your guests’ reaction at your next dinner party. What if alongside your china, crystal and silver you were to grace your table with a few of these candles cum sculptures? Start your personal “operation snuff” with the rim of your bathtub. Then turn your attention to the blobs adorning your bedroom. Proceed with garbage bag in hand to every corner of your abode and eradicate the offending items. Use a chisel to remove the drips. You could actually forget to blow your candles out some evening and accelerate the entire clutter clearing process. This may seem harsh, but it is worth it. If it’s the ambiance you crave, buy a dimmer.

(One last note ... they usually don't hold up well in direct sunlight either.)

Battery Cram

For better or for worse, batteries have become indispensable sources of energy powering everything from cell phones to sex toys. They come in a bewildering array of sizes and composition, some re-chargeable and others which go lifeless in what seems like a matter of seconds. Some people dedicate entire drawers to store them. Mostly they wind up in myriad locations around the house, generally wherever there is a spare inch of space, like the dog’s bowl or the vegetable crisper. Our issues are not with the batteries that are still in their packages waiting to be impressed into service. It’s the discards. Because people are unsure of how or where to recycle them responsibly, they become victims of neglect. Rather than dispose of them, the tendency is allow them to lie around indefinitely. You will come across them while digging in a drawer looking for a pen that works and ask yourself, is this battery expired or not? The sensible thing would be to test them out, but generally that falls under the category of “too much trouble”. Consequently, they are left in a state of perpetual limbo, neither embraced nor rejected.

Challenge
Bite the bullet. Declare today as battery round-up day. Get everyone in your household to empty their night stands, junk drawers, desk drawers, wicker baskets and other usual stashes for small objects that you use for emergency clean-ups when company is at the door. You can retire the duds while identifying the ones that will breathe life into a Gameboy. You might save enough money from this endeavor to treat yourself to a pedicure.

TOP 100 THINGS YOU NEED LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD

We are what we keep. In an age characterized by over-consumption, it appears that objects earn our affections, as opposed to people. As real life professional organizers we confront, head-on, the results of this acquisition phenomenon. Much of it defies logic, not to mention the laws of physics. After 5 years toiling side-by-side with clients, we have come to realize that the problem with too much "stuff" is directly linked to the repeat offenders!! We are talking about the things we see over and over again in homes that, to us, constitute the majority of peoples' clutter. Join us as we take you on tour of The Top 100 Things You Need Like a Hole in the Head.

Join us as we identify some of these items you will find in the *Kitchen*.

Polygamy
We might possibly be entering the age of the demise of the ubiquitous plastic bag. These environmental pariahs have come to symbolize a genuine blight on the collective landscape. Retail outlets are making efforts to replace them with re-usable cloth alternatives. Still, wherever we go, we still find hundreds under the bathroom sink, in broom closets and bags of bags plugging up the floors of wardrobe closets. It is astounding how many can be squeezed into the tiniest of spaces, similar to the surprising number of clowns that emerge from a VW Beetle in the circus. We had one client who lived in a 350 square foot apartment who was stockpiling them for when he got a dog. His landlord did not even allow pets! After a decade or two, poly bags start their own form of decomposition. Ones that once bore food develop unpleasant odors and a slimy feel. It you store things in the opaque ones, its likely that the contents will never see the light of day. You can save a couple for legitimate uses like preventing your hair gel from oozing out all over your clothes in a suitcase or for lining a garbage can.

Challenge: We have one sure-fire solution for getting rid of a big wad in one “swell foop”. When you are working on purging your collectables and bric-a-brac, why not wrap the fragile and breakable items in them, prior to taking them to consignment or thrift store. This allows you to accomplish two organizing tasks at the same time. Your junk will arrive at its ultimate destination unblemished. You will be bag free in no time. Otherwise, invest in a dog. Better still…don’t bring them home with you anymore. Try to remember to pack those reusable cloth bags in your car. Afterall you’ve been purchasing them at various outlets since they hit the marketplace. They’re the ones you remember you have tucked away in a closet at home, when you’re at the check-out counter at the local grocery store.


Mug Shots
Where would most of us be without coffee? We are among the first to admit the importance this precious liquid boasts for our productivity, not to mention regularity. Yet, the question must be raised. What is the appropriate number of coffee cups an individual need own at any one time? Yes, we acknowledge that not all coffee cups are alike. After all, there are cups with saucers, mugs, and ones for demitasse. What we see repeatedly is an army of coffee mugs hung on trees, suspended from under the counter hooks and lined up in formation in our clients’ kitchens. Some folks consider them to be collectable, hoarding cartons full of them in storage spaces. If truth be told, we probably have not even paid for most of them. They find their way in like other promotional items –giveaways at golf tournaments or mementos from conferences and trade shows. Others arrive as part of festive food baskets filled with hard candy. Some are gifts from people who lack imagination. Still others are inherited. One thing’s for sure. In all probability, you won’t find any two that match!

Challenge: If you have an entire cabinet devoted to mugs, you have your work cut out for you. The first cut are any that are chipped, cracked or have a smiley face on the surface. If you have a pellet gun, you can use those for target practice. Then toss the ones that have been through the dishwasher so many times that you can no longer make out what the picture or writing are supposed to mean. Unless you harbor a strong affection for your auto insurance broker, add any bearing the name or logo of his company to the discard heap. If your best friend asks what happened to the lopsided mug she made in her ceramics class for you, tell her it broke. She will never know.

No Can Do!

Believe it or not, canned food does not last forever. There is a lot of guesswork around figuring out the vintage of a particular can, especially if the illegible numbers are as indecipherable as some ancient code. We know there is a shelf life to every can. We prefer the term used by the British. They refer to it as "the death date". We have witnessed unspeakable cupboard disasters, the result of cans left far too long. Sometimes they explode and leave a residue similar to the consistency of asphalt. Other times they are sneaky, corroding from the inside-out, and leach their way into cementing themselves onto your shelves. We know this from experience.

Any organizing job we encounter entailing the sorting and purging of the contents of a long-lost kitchen cupboard, is administered by us in garb reminiscent of a gear donned by a bomb squad!! Exploding cans of food can cause extreme damage. OK, maybe we haven’t seen a detonation in action. But we can attest to the fact that the ooze from leaky cans is far superior than contact-cement for gluing down ceramic tiles...forever! Paper shelf-liners are no defense. We caution you to be particularly watchful of pineapple and tomato based products. They are the most dangerous.

Expired canned food is most likely to be found in the impossible corner kitchen cabinet that lies between your sink and your stove. You know the one we mean. It's the cupboard that only a contortionist can fit into. It is probably also known as the burial ground for long lost gadgets like broken toasters, the juicer you bought on the home shopping channel or the yellowed and cracked ice cube trays from your old refrigerator from 70's.

Challenge
Don’t for one second think about giving that expired food to the food bank! Take an hour or so to comb through the cans. Dented ones go first. Anything with a coating of dust is a sure throw-away. If you can’t read the “Best Before” date and can’t remember where, when or why you bought the chick peas, remember to err on the side of caution. After all, this is your life we're talking about!

The 10 Condiments

One of the greatest things about our fast food nation is all the conveniently packaged freebies we get to load up on. No Chinese take-out meal would seem complete without the requisite assortment of sauces and fortune cookies. A visit to the local burger establishment would be deficient minus a ketchup packet or 3. We love them because they are so hygienic, unlike the big containers we have in our refrigerators that get crusty and fused shut along the handy flip-top cap. Still, you normally wind up using only a portion of what these eateries have generously supplied. Whatever is left over is simply slipped into a drawer to frolic with renegade toothpicks, old bottle caps, loose twist ties and a couple of paper napkins. Over time, you can accumulate quite a stash. Around the time that you are no longer able to close the drawer, you should mull over the idea of thinning them out. After all, they are food products that eventually do expire, despite the presence of an illegible date. Safety first!!

Challenge
Repeat after us. Thou shalt not save any of the following from this point forward:
Soy sauce packets
Sweet and Sour sauce packets
Artificial sweeteners from the coffee shop
Tartar sauce packets
Tiny coffee creamers
Mustard packages
Mayo packages
Salt and pepper shakers from airplanes (available in first Class or on foreign airlines only)
Wasabi packets
Oyster crackers that come with soup

Other People

There is a point that almost everyone eventually reaches, when say they say "Enough"! The storage capacity is maxed. There’s no room in the closet for another thing. There are boxes that have remained unexplored for so long, they sport layers of dust and mold. The reasons and timing may differ, but the conclusion is the same. They must do something about the stuff that prevents the home from being a comfort zone.

Only, often they don’t know where to begin. We suggest evaluating how much of the clutter is actually yours versus someone else’s. Who do you know that has been using your basement, extra bedrooms, garage, attic or storage locker to preserve their stuff for immortality? Yes. We are talking about children or friends who are avoiding making decisions, typically hanging on to vestiges of former lives, due to your generosity. Of course, some may be away at school or travelling and may be saving furniture and other possessions for when they have larger living quarters. But the vast majority of excess belongings that we encounter at our clients’ homes don’t fit into those legitimate categories. They are the rusted bed frame left behind by an old friend who has since moved to another city. Or, they are abandoned collections of mildewed magazines and stuffed animals, that have been simply forgotten. Or perhaps binders that should have been returned to an organization for which you had once volunteered.

If you want to get serious about getting your clutter under control, you would be well served to contact those people who have been the beneficiaries of mini-storage at no charge and request that they come to confront and remove their personal artifacts from your premises. You need to communicate a sense of urgency, specifying deadlines and your intentions regarding future use of the space. Treat it like an appointment. Don’t be afraid to explain that unclaimed items would be donated to charity. You will be amazed at how much space you will free up, by reducing the volume of storage used by the "other people" in your home.

Failure to Launch

Back at the end of March, Good Riddance’s services became the subject of piece in our local Vancouver newspaper under the rubric of Do It Better (www.theprovince.com/doitbetter). The reporter wanted to shoot a video that would showcase our de-cluttering process. Our clients, members of the Baby Boomer generation, looking forward to retirement and allegedly “empty nesters” agreed to become the case study for the report. I say allegedly because although their twenty-something children had left home, their belongings had not. In their son’s case, he had moved downtown, but his bedroom remained frozen in time, housing his clothing, music, sports equipment, books and memorabilia that he hadn’t the room for in his small apartment. Their daughter had likewise moved out on her own, only to return several years later with her craft supplies, collectables and wardrobe. When she came home, she deposited her bags and cartons in the finished basement, converting a would-be media room into warehouse space. We were brought in to organize the “wrecked’ room into a rec room.

Ever since the release of the comedy, “Failure to Launch”, much has been written about this phenomenon of the “boomerang” kids and the economic, social and psychological drivers responsible for the behavior. After a point, what parents don’t fantasize about reclaiming the house for their own purposes – converting bedrooms into home offices, gyms, and meditation or craft rooms? Is it not a reasonable expectation that when they do leave, that adult children take their possessions with them and not leave them with Mom or Dad for time immemorial? As professional organizers, we encounter many situations similar to the one described above. Parents often walk a thin line in making their adult children feel welcome while postponing their own plans for a post-child centric abode. We believe it is important for parents to address this with adult children. Expectations must be communicated, lest resentments build. Adult children need to understand that their family home should not be treated as a giant storage locker. Clutter is everyone’s responsibility, no matter what age. Use it or lose it!