Many of us experience the need to downsize or help others downsize. The tips below will help you become a downsizing master!

They say you teach what you need most to learn. As I filmed this television show in preparation for my talk at the Western Reserve Masonic Community in Medina Ohio, I realized that Read the rest of this entry »

Situation: This garage had plenty of built-in storage but a mess was created when we decided to get rid of the off-site storage unit and consolidate everything into the garage. As with most organizing projects, there is usually temporary chaos before there is order.

Challenge: The back wall of this garage had built-in floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall shelves but they were completely full of childhood memories consisting of one large plastic bin per child per year.With three kids all of them at least in middle school, that meant a lot of bins!

Solution: We went through all of the kid’s  memory boxes. At first it was very hard for my client to get rid of childhood papers. She eventually became a champ at making decisions and letting go of enough memories so that each child’s memory items could fit into only one to two bins each. This reduced the storage bins from about 6-8 per child to 2 which gave us a lot more space to store items brought from the off-site storage unit. My client did an amazing job learning how to let go. Her kids still have plenty of great memorabilia to discover and uncover later!

Solution: Find the photos that you really love & frame them. For the others, ruthlessly toss the blurry, red eyed, duplicate & boring photos. After all, do you really need 2 photos of Uncle Ted on his houseboat? For the remaining photos, store them in a keepsake box that you can pull out & look into from time to time.