One of the best gifts that Jim and Elise Lomas found when they tackled the clutter that had taken command of their house was a small slip of paper they didn’t even know they still had.
Today, it sits prominently under glass on a desk in an orderly home office where the Oro Valley couple can see it every day.
“To Daddy, From Nancy,” it says in a child’s handwriting with as many hearts and X’s and O’s as their daughter could fit on the page.
If not for the decision to get a professional to help them organize the home, the note and another homemade card made by their daughter — now an adult — might never have been seen again, maybe caught up in a purge or maybe never to surface again among the clutter.
The point had been reached in September to get an outsider to help, and the process began when the Lomases hired a professional organizer, Jennifer Phelps, owner of Ms. Fix-It Home Solutions.
“We couldn’t find anything,” Elise said, prompting the couple to look for help with reorganizing the home they have lived in since 1999.
To see the current order in the Lomas’ home makes it difficult to picture the disarray they described before Phelps was called in.
Elise opens her walk-in closet today and her hanging clothes are in order by color and style, shorts and pants, blouses and dresses, outfits with sleeves and without sleeves. Dresser drawers are in order with shirts and socks neatly folded. Sheets are in a drawer in a spare bedroom and they have only as many as they use.
A little more than six months ago, Elise said, laundry was piled throughout the house and they just couldn’t catch up.
“My house was never cluttered like that,” she said.
Phelps, who is president of Tucson Professional Organizers, a local trade group, said it’s not unusual for someone, like the Lomas couple, to suddenly be caught up in a situation where their home gets cluttered to the point of literally not being able to dig out. She said a traumatic event can trigger a situation, and in the Lomas’ case, she said, it appears it was the death of Elise’s parents 10 years ago.
Suddenly, the Lomases, who both are home living on disability, had to deal with all of her parents’ possessions, a large amount of which they took into their 1,600-square-foot home, and most of which didn’t fit. Two bedrooms and the garage became holding areas for much of what the couple took in, which crowded the rest of the house.
“While we’re not talking about a big problem like hoarding or anything,” Phelps said, “it is a fact that often an event has occurred in someone’s life or in a family’s situation that has caused them to get behind, and they’re just not quite able to get themselves back to normal without some assistance.”
While each situation can be unique, there are some basic principles to reorganizing that help someone tackle what can seem like an insurmountable situation, she said.
Rule No. 1, Phelps said: “Don’t organize junk.”
“The first step is to remove the things that are easy to remove without too much thought,” Phelps said. “There are things that have no emotional attachment that can go away without any real emotional effort.”
But even though there’s a realization that stuff has to go, Jim said, it’s still not easy to actually do it.
“It is a little difficult,” Jim said. “You have to make a decision to say, ‘Yes, we have to get rid of certain things.’ It comes during the process. At the beginning of the process it’s not as easy to say.”
For Elise, parting with her parents’ possessions was doubly difficult in that all of it had some emotional attachment. In her mind, she said, there was no junk.
“When my mother and father passed away it was overwhelming to me and there were certain things I just couldn’t part with,” she said. “But I had to give it away. I had to part with it. It was very difficult. It was beautiful, beautiful stuff.”
Phelps said a technique that helps with that particular decision process is to donate items to organizations near and dear to the heart.
In the Lomas’ case, Jim said they donated excess office supplies to schools they support. Clothing went to the Gospel Rescue Mission, to local women’s and children’s centers, the Golden Goose Thrift Shop in Catalina, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and to organizations that support Vietnam veterans.
They also sold a lot of their stuff, Jim said, first making use of their neighborhood’s twice-a-year garage sale that brought in plenty of lookers and buyers. They also sold items online, as Jim once had a small business that sold items on eBay.
“We had a big garage sale,” Jim said. “That was actually the first project — going through and finding everything we would want to sell in a garage sale. And what we didn’t sell, we donated.”
Phelps said that at the beginning of the organizing process, it’s important to find a place to make an immediate impact, even if it’s the space that doesn’t appear to be the obvious starting point. A homeowner may think a certain room is the root of the clutter, when actually it’s another space that is causing the clutter in that space.
“Sometimes you have to come at it from a different angle than the homeowner to really clear the logjam and get things moving,” Phelps said. “You have to figure out what’s the linchpin. A homeowner might say I really need this particular room done. But I might see that something else has to be done first to get that done.
“Really it’s based on what is going to get the homeowner feeling more at ease in the shortest amount of time. You just have to create space to work in because often there’s really no room to sort stuff. So you have to create spaces where you can separate things out. Sometimes things get more topsy-turvy when you’re pulling things out and categorizing.”
One of the biggest accomplishments in the effort, the Lomases said, is that they now have a guest bedroom in their former “ultimate junk room.” It was a room, Elise said, where she had to crawl over the bed to get from one side of the room to the other because there was no room to walk.
The room now has two tidy dressers, one where they keep their bedding neatly folded, the other for Jim’s clothes. Now the focus is to keep it orderly, which the couple said is a lot less work than trying to sort through clutter to find an important document or piece of clothing.
“It’s a new lifestyle,” Jim said. “Some days when you’re getting older you don’t want to have to do as much. Simplifying things was a real plus so we try to keep it up. ”
