Professional Home Organizing: Labor
Hi! My name is Audra, I’m the owner of organizing company Elevated Order, and here are a few things I think will be helpful for you to understand about the labor involved in home organization.
You may be saying to yourself, “I see the value in being organized, but why is it so expensive?”
There is a good answer to this and I’ll break it down a bit for you by explaining two things: Product and Labor. Read them in whichever order you prefer, but here’s the link to Product.
To put it simply, there isn’t a quick way to pull, categorize, organize, and style hundreds or thousands of things. I've added a table below which is an estimate for what we generally see in a client’s closet. Is it surprising that there are 40-50 categories and about 600 items? Before you look, how many items do you think you have in your closet?
Pull and Categorize-This first phase can go pretty quickly, so let’s say 10 seconds for us to handle each item. So accounting for around 600 items, that’s about 200 minutes - so, over 3 hours just to pull and sort! We then determine which categories make the most sense for your items. Should we combine certain categories based on how you utilize them? Are any categories eliminated after you determine what all stays and leaves the closet? This part of the process blurs into the organizing phase. I would like to add that you CAN NOT accurately categorize SOME items. One of the main points of the process is to see everything you have all together. So, you must pull EVERYTHING to do this correctly.
Organizing-This is the phase that takes considerably longer because this is when all of the strategy and implementation for your items happens. Switching out all hangers so they are uniform, the optimal folding of items, space planning for the different categories in your closet, loading shoes on racks, binning small or seasonal items, building any elements or products to organize with, and labeling all of the drawers, shelves, bins and closet rod dividers to set all the systems in place so you can easily maintain them. Let’s say 30 seconds conservatively for each item. That’s 10 more hours! As I hope the math shows, this isn’t 13 hours of “fair effort”, this is 13 hours of busting our butts…happily. Since we don't have an emotional attachment to any of the items, we're able to fly through it without any bias. But if YOU do it yourself and go even half as quickly because you get sentimental and spend extra time reminiscing over a lot of your items, it’s easy to see how this could easily become 30-40+ hours for you alone. This is why many people who have aspirations of doing it themselves start - then stop out of fatigue and/or frustration and never start again…or just never start.
There is another huge value proposition for our expertise as professional organizers. We can not only get it done faster and more strategically, but we have the ability to envision your space as something completely different than what it starts as because we can pretty quickly see where there are opportunities to create additional storage and even remove unnecessary elements that aren’t utilizing the space in the best way possible. When you have looked at the same closet laid out in the same way for years and years, it makes it very difficult to envision it any other way and you hit a wall on how to make it ‘work’ with all of your items. We are pros and we can reinvent the layout of any space, with or without some minor construction. It will not only look amazing, but will function based on your utilization of each category. We will discuss your wants and needs during our initial consultation, come up with a plan, and execute that plan so that you finally get what works for YOU.
Styling-This is one of my favorite parts of the process. We love creating perfectly organized spaces, but why not take it a step further and make it look stunning at the same time! We want you to fall in love with every space of your home, so this final part of the process creates the ‘wow’ factor in your final results. If you have a favorite pair of heels or beautiful purse or clutch you are proud of, we want to showcase it so you can enjoy seeing it every day whether you wear it that day or not. We have a lot of smart tricks up our sleeves to accomplish a beautifully styled space. So, how would you feel if you felt like you were walking into a chic boutique to put together a strong outfit every single time you walk into your closet? It’s a pretty great thought, right?
Anyway, I hope this helps to understand what we do. Thank you!
Here is a spreadsheet for you to make your own estimates on quantities of items you have.