Americans love to shop—it’s practically the national pastime! We’re bargain-hunting, credit-card-maxing, no‑holds-barred shoppers. The thrill of the hunt and the joy of instant gratification make our economy run. But one of the threats of our consumer culture is that it’s created a huge problem of clutter in our homes. The more we buy, the more we have to maintain, clean, store, and retrieve. If you’re a typical American, you shop faster than you can manage what you already own, and that’s a formula for a cluttered home.

Clutter issues cover a broad spectrum, from a few stacks here and there to conditions so bad that you can’t walk through the house. As a professional organizer, the first part of my job is to figure out where you are on the spectrum. Can you handle the piles yourself, or do you need my help? Here are some of the clues I look for when I’m trying to help a client answer that question:

• Clutter has taken over your space. Do you have a few piles of paper, or is the top of your desk buried? Are there two or three extra appliances on the kitchen counter, or are the counter tops unusable? Can you fit a car in your garage, or have the cars been parked in the driveway for the last 10 years? Do you need a park ranger to map the footpaths that wind through the rooms of your home?
• You’re overwhelmed. The clutter bothers you, and you often think to yourself, “I’ve got to get this under control, so I’m going to start today.” But then you face the area to be organized and freeze like a deer in the headlights. You have no clue how to start, so you decide it’s time for lunch. Or maybe you start again and again, but find that you’re moving the same stuff around over and over. Does it feel like you’ve done this work many times before, but you’re getting nowhere?
• You’re ready to make a commitment. You want different results, and you want them so bad that you’re ready to spend time and money to get them. One of my clever clients put it this way: “I had to do a cost–benefit analysis on my clutter and realize that the cost of standing still was greater than what I’d have to invest to move forward.” He’s right: it takes an investment of time, effort, and money to get organized. You’re ready for a professional organizer when you’ve come to understand the higher cost of standing still.

But the reward for your investment will be huge. The time and money you commit will give you back peace of mind, lift the emotional weight of clutter off your shoulders, and make you master of your domain again, instead of a slave to the contents thereof. When you’re ready to do whatever it takes to make your space a livable, beautiful, restful environment again, when you’re ready to invest in your quality of life, you’re ready for a professional organizer.

Are you there yet? 

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“Green” is everywhere these days—in the news, in the workplace, and on store shelves. So wherever I speak to audiences in this environmentally conscious climate, I get a lot of questions about recycling. I started collecting the questions that have stumped me, and then I went online to look for answers.

I live in Houston, as do many of my clients, so I started with the City of Houston recycling web site. What I found there was chaotic, inconsistent, full of confusing acronyms and ambiguities, and spread across a mind-numbing array of pages. I despaired of ever tracking down all the answers I needed. But the Clutter Fairy makes her living bringing order out of chaos, so I dug into the project of making sense of it all. My staff and I deconstructed a huge mass of information and rearranged it in what we hope you’ll find a user-friendly guide to recycling in Houston.

View the recycling guide here.

A special note to our readers elsewhere in Greater Houston: the City of Houston, Abitibi Consolidated, and H-E-B have created a partnership to offer recycling at 22 H‑E‑B grocery stores in the outlying areas. See the list of accepted materials and a map of participating locations (PDF).

In a previous newsletter, we promised a “comprehensive guide,” but I’ve since realized that the City of Houston is only the tip of the iceberg of recycling efforts in our region. The good news: There are more ways than ever to keep things out of our landfills and to safeguard the environment. We couldn’t cover them all here, but this is a solid start, and we plan to add more resources in the future.

I encourage you to think of recycling as one part of a larger strategy for eliminating clutter from your life, managing the waste you generate, and “greening” your lifestyle and the planet:

• Reduce: First and foremost, you can save time, storage space, and money by planning your purchases carefully. Don’t buy more than you need or more than you can store. Remember, it’s not a bargain if you have nowhere to put it when you get home. If you shop as a form of recreation, look all you want, try things on, handle them in the store, but don’t buy them!
• Reuse: Before you recycle or dispose of something that still has usefulness, consider giving it to a friend, family member, posting it on the Houston Freecycle™ Network Yahoo Group, or selling it on Craig’s List. Don’t fall into the cluttered recycler’s trap of thinking, “If it’s still useful, I have to keep it.” No, you don’t! If you want to be organized, find a way for someone else to benefit from whatever usefulness remains.
• Recycle: More materials than ever before are being accepted for recycling, and the increase in volume, along with improvements in technology, should continue to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of recycling processes. Check out our guide below for methods and facilities to recycle a wide variety of common materials.
• As a last resort, dispose of waste in a safe and appropriate fashion.

Editor’s note: We here at The Clutter Fairy are not infallible. If you discover any factual errors or important omissions, or if you find information that’s been updated since we prepared the guide, please let us know so we can update our data.