Professional organizer Rachel Siegel makes her friends nervous.
When the mountains of junk mail, preschool art, magazines and strewn clothes begin to take on mythic proportions in a home, it’s time to call in a professional—someone like Rachel Siegel, founder of the Berkeley-based organizing firm Spruce Girls. According to Siegel, she has always been organized. As a child she dutifully went through her mother’s coupons and retired the expired ones. In college she organized her dorm room closet over and over again. Sloppily arranged office supplies cringe at the mere sight of Siegel. One fine day in 2001 she revealed to a friend that instead of doing something glamorous on a weekend she had helped a pal organize and had way more fun than sipping mimosas. Inspired, Siegel realized she had found her true calling: to organize the world, or at least the part of it taken up by those willing to cough up $125 an hour (two-hour minimum). With thoughts of spring cleaning dancing through my head, I called Siegel recently to see if she could help me get my house in order, metaphorically speaking.
Paul Kilduff: I’m curious, are most of your clients hoarders?
Rachel Siegel: No. I think there’s a scale and my clients are not. I have had hoarders in the past and in my opinion an organizer can’t really help them. That’s a psychological issue and so I have stopped taking those clients. I have worked with one client where I said you need to be in therapy at the same time and he was. He was particularly working on this issue, so what I ended up doing was helping him move his homework from his therapist forward. And he was really ready for it. But otherwise it doesn’t help.
PK: Have you thought about becoming a licensed therapist?
RS: I’ve thought that it would be useful, but no.
PK: Are you aware of the recent study that indicated that people with messy houses tend to be overweight while those in more organized digs are slim?
RS: I didn’t see the study, but I’ve seen it [happen].
PK: You’ve seen this in action?
RS: Anecdotally speaking. The whole hoarding thing is bringing stuff in toward yourself and surrounding yourself with stuff which is similar to surrounding yourself with food. I took a psychology class in college, I’m not an expert . . . .
PK: But you’re on the front lines. I know you don’t take diagnosed hoarders, but there must be indications of this behavior with your clients?
RS: With my clients, and everybody, we all probably have some little areas that are a little more hoardy than others. Some people have problems with memorabilia, like if they cannot throw out a card that they got for their birthday or that their kid got, even if it says nothing more than “Love Mom.”
PK: Talk to my wife. What is it with women and saving cards?
RS: It’s definitely a fix.
PK: Did you see the New Yorker cartoon a while back—it just showed a building dubbed “The Museum of Preschool Art.” As the father of a seven-year-old I thought to myself, “How many egg crates and cereal boxes held together with pipe cleaners am I going to have to save?”
RS: You’ll be surprised. I had a client with . . . these giant garbage cans, four of them, filled, and her kids are seven and eight.
PK: Filled with priceless art gems?
RS: With whatever art. With anything that had touched crayon to paper. And the thing is, it’s true that the younger the kid the more they’re producing. Sadly, as they get older they produce less art.
PK: Sadly?
RS: But she had at least 10 more years to go before this kid went off to college. And we worked through it together.
PK: What did you do—schedule an exorcism?
RS: Each thing was so precious and such a miracle to her. So we kind of tried to divide it up by time period and then tried to pick the really best selection.
PK: The greatest hits …
RS: From the blue period.
PK: Did you whittle down to one garbage can?
RS: We got it smaller than that. And then we made these big document boxes for each year with a few for the preschool years and they’re all stacked nicely now in a closet and that’s how many she’s allowed to have each year.
PK: That solution sounds a lot like what Andy Warhol used to do—he’d take random ephemera from each year and put it in a box. Do you recommend that?
RS: Well, the amount of stuff you have is only really controlled by the amount of space you have for a lot of people and so I hear it all the time: I don’t have enough space for my stuff. Okay, that probably means you have too much stuff. So, if you have enough space for a box for each year, that’s an awesome solution because the box will help you control how much you can keep and it means that you have to make choices.
PK: Are you saying that if you’re at the point where you have to rent a storage space for your junk, you have too much stuff?
RS: Yep. There are exceptions. If you’re in the middle of a remodel or you know you’re moving in a year, somebody’s recently passed away and the furniture hasn’t been split up yet, that kind of stuff.
PK: When I had cable TV—I’m sort of like Ghandi now, just living that over-the-air lifestyle—I was hooked on the TLC TV show Clean Sweep where they’d do triage operations on these junk-pile homes. With every one they’d have the owners separate all the crap into three piles: Goodwill, garage sale and keep. Do you do that?
RS: Similar. We don’t do garage sales because I sort of feel like it takes so much time—if you had time you’d be organizing yourself. But yeah, it’s that sort of idea. Just last week I was working in a client’s clothing wardrobe and I just literally dumped all of her sweaters out and said, “Okay, three piles. Keep, donate, trash.”
PK: Just curious with men’s underpants—until there’s absolutely no fabric below the elastic waistband it’s okay to keep, right? And more than a little sexy, I might add.
RS: Plenty of women have the same issues . . . . This client last week said, “Well I just got it last summer, but I never wore it and it actually doesn’t look that good on me. But I just got it.” Well, it’s not going to look any better on you next summer.
PK: I hate to bring up my mom, but she can’t get rid of anything. Many years ago she decided to have a garage sale, something she’d never done. Nobody came. Do you think people get bogged down in this garage sale thing?
RS: I think they do. I think they think that’s how they can rationalize getting rid of their stuff or if they put it on eBay. Which is great, if you have time. But that takes a ton of time. Then you’re choosing between the amount of money you’re going to make versus your time. And for some people who have much more time than money that’s awesome. I’ve had four fairly successful garage sales. One when I moved in with my now husband, then boyfriend, which was to skim off the worst of what we had.
PK: Undoubtedly mostly his crap.
RS: Actually, I would say we kept more of his because he had more money to spend. Then the second round was after a year when we realized, okay we are going to stay together, save the stuff that we were kind of keeping just in case. And then the third was when we got married and now we’ve got this stuff that replaced our perfectly good stuff. And then when we had the baby so we had to make space for him. But we had more time than money. And it took a ton of time to have these garage sales and probably we made $1,000 off of all four of them. And my husband has a lot of patience for eBay so he will sell his little whatevers on eBay. For example he decided that he really wanted a plasma TV and there was nothing wrong with our old TV—except that it was giant and it wasn’t cool. For years we went on about this and so he decided if he could clean out the garage by selling his crap on eBay and he had enough money in his PayPal account then we’d buy a TV and he did. Having that particular goal helped.
PK: What about consignment stores—seems like an overlooked venue for hoarders.
RS: Again, it’s all about time. You have to get yourself together. Take it there. Hear them tell you which things they’re not going to take.
PK: That’s always a little embarrassing—a real gut check.
RS: Exactly. I mean anything you can get some return for is great. I love to put stuff up on Craigslist when I know I’m going to be home to show it and then just take it down if it doesn’t sell. At least for my clients that’s just one more thing on their to-do list that they probably aren’t going to get done.
PK: What about the whole post-organizing conundrum where every item—especially kid stuff—must be donated (or foisted off, depending on how you look at it) to the niece in L.A.?
RS: It adds a whole other errand on top of it.
PK: Do you see that people put this stipulation to shoot themselves in the foot without realizing it?
RS: I think so. And then they’re suddenly paralyzed because it’s not just we have to go through this stuff that we’re living with, it’s that then we have to go through this stuff we’ve already decided we’re not living with. A better idea is to have a big container tucked into your daughter’s closet. When that container’s full, you send it off to the niece. That’s a real easy way to do it and then it’s not a multi-step process, it’s a one-step process.
PK: No offense, but shouldn’t we be able to organize our houses ourselves?
RS: It seems like you should be able to do it yourself, but a year goes by and you don’t. And one of the reasons that you don’t is because you’re so close to it. It’s really hard to be objective about your own stuff. I can stand there while she’s sorting the sweaters into three piles and she can realize how silly it is to keep the sweater with the big hole in a way that [she can’t] if I’m not standing there. In some ways you could do this with a friend but then you really have to expose [yourself]. I see it all—the threadbare underpants . . .
PK: So, by hiring a professional organizer instead of luring a friend over with the promise of a pizza, you’re avoiding personal embarrassment.
RS: Right. If you go to visit your friend’s house you might be a medicine cabinet peerer-inner, but beyond that you’re not seeing the inside story. You’re seeing the outside story and it’s amazing how many houses—when you first go in—look great. But when you really see what’s in the closets, what’s in the drawers, what’s behind closed doors, it’s a whole different story.
PK: Is it worth having something if you can’t find it?
RS: No. And also not if you can’t take good care of it. I think before you bring anything in you have to think about what it’s replacing. Like what’s going out, and if you’re a “case” you might have to say what two things are going out, and where is it going to live? The second it comes into the house it can go to the place where it’s going to live because there’s space for it there. And if you can’t answer those two questions, you can’t bring it in . . . . I actually have had clients who had been planning remodels because they think they are going to need more space and when I’m done with them they realize that they don’t, at least for the short term. I just feel so strongly that you should be able to fit in the space that you have.
PK: But buying stuff you don’t need is intoxicating and patriotic.
RS: It turns out that it’s more intoxicating to have space in your house. Space to move, space to think. I had a client years ago who was a writer and she had not written for years and once we were done she wrote a short story that weekend and then proceeded to start Weight Watchers and lost 40 pounds. And it wasn’t like we made her write or lose weight, it’s just that she had the space, kind of the metaphorical space to have other things come into her life.
PK: With clothes, do you believe in the old adage, if you haven’t worn something in a year it’s time for it to go?
RS: Again, it comes down to your space. If you have space to keep it and you haven’t worn it, okay, keep it. But when it comes to shoving more in, that would be a good test to see if something should go.
PK: So, in other words, don’t put freshness dating labels on your clothes—“Last worn, April 2002.” Do people hold you to a higher standard on the neat-as-a-pin scale when they come over to your house?
RS: I feel so much pressure when people come over that they’re totally judging me, but it doesn’t always look completely spruce-ready. But it takes no more than 10 minutes to get the whole house organized. Everything has a place. We can just sweep through and it’s not like take all the mail and shove it in a bag—uh, that drives me nuts. It’s okay, the mail’s on the counter, these are catalogs they go here. These are bills, they go here. It can happen so quickly.
PK: It takes us hours—and we’re both uptight neat freaks. That’s why I’m a big supporter of having people come over because it forces us to clean up.
RS: The house is going to look great and you’re going to have leftovers.
PK: Exactly.
RS: I love the day after.
PK: Little bits of pasta salad from the deli.
RS: And they brought it over and you haven’t paid for it. It’s awesome.
PK: Any tips for someone who’s not quite ready or can’t afford a professional organizer?
RS: Start small. Pick a small area. It could even be a drawer. And dump it all out. Let’s take the kitchen junk drawer for example. Dump the whole thing out and just think about what belongs there—and you should have a junk drawer in your kitchen, don’t be embarrassed about that.
PK: What if you can’t even open it?
RS: Well, be embarrassed about that. But I think the idea is if you can start small you’ll have a lot more success. It gives you momentum to go onto the next level.
PK: Rome wasn’t organized in a day.
RS: Like, I’m going to organize my closet on Saturday. Well, that could be a big job. So think, I’m just going to do my shoes and I’m just going to really think about the three piles. Keep, donate, trash. And really, if you’re going to donate—take it out right then. Put it in the car and just do it. Don’t let it linger around the house. Then it becomes another thing in the house.
PK: Pre-housecleaner cleaning up? Do you recommend?
RS: Well, it’s a matter of what you want from your housecleaner. Do you want your housecleaner to be moving the project off the dining room table or do you want them to be able to do the actual deeper cleaning? Like the dusting?
PK: Yeah. I don’t want to pay someone to put junk mail away.
RS: Right. And if you don’t move it they might. I go into so many houses where the housecleaner has just had it. They can’t clean so they take everything and just sweep piles of mail into grocery bags. They don’t get rid of the bags. We have found all kinds of things from people’s death certificates to the value pack.
PK: When you go to a friend’s house …
RS: They get nervous.
PK: Have you lost friendships over your profession?
RS: I hope not. Funny. I don’t get invited out much. No, I try really hard not to judge where I go. But it’s never long until they ask me a question. I was at a friend’s house recently and we were chatting and he said, “Now, what would you do with this?” and he points at this mountain of dolls and stuffed animals. And his wife’s going, “Oh don’t ask her that.” But I had ideas.
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Suggestions? E-mail Paul Kilduff at PKilduff@sbcglobal.net.
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Age: 43 | Astrological sign: Pisces
Birthplace: Rochester, NY (but I grew up in Baltimore)
First real job: Scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins in 11th grade
Favorite pizza topping: Green onions, mushrooms, kalamata olives and anchovies
Mideast peace plan: Hummus . . . everybody loves it and if everybody sat down together to eat some they’d find out that they have more in common than they think.
Words to live by: Err on the side of kindness.
