Lose Your Excess Baggage

CONTENT FROM: REAL ESTATE COLLECTION SPRING 2017

PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2017

Here’s a test to figure out your own personal surface area-to-volume ratio. Pick any room in your house, and count the number of surfaces that are free from objects otherwise unrelated to that surface. For example, a coffee maker belongs on a kitchen counter; a newspaper does not (bless you, though). If that number is greater than the number of children you have — no children, no excuse; your surfaces should be pristine and pile-free — you may be suffering from Disorder Disorder.

Your mother might have told you to smarten up and clean up after yourself, and though she meant well, earlier generations are just not enlightened on the tribulations of modern life that might get between us and our piles of stuff.

Statuses must be kept up to date; brunches must be documented on social media; there’s a Netflix show to be binged on or chilled with. And though the pharmaceutical industry has not yet come up with a cure for DD, there is hope. Actually, it’s a button, a white button on organizersincanada.com, right below the words “Find an Organizer.”

“I’m a coach,” says Angie LeClair, one of the organizers on the other side of that button, who charges $75 an hour to help you, in the slightly paraphrased words of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, take responsibility for your own stuff. “I’m a hand-holder. I’ll pull everything out of your closet, go through everything for you, and see that you have 40 pairs of black yoga pants.”

She gently suggests you may not need more than four. If you agree, she acts fast. “As soon as people make the decision to get rid of things, she says of her clients, “they’re out of there, they’re in my truck, and they’re gone.”

Make a PLAN

Clare Kumar, another member of Professional Organizers in Canada, is more life coach than coach, and gives her clients, whom she charges as much as $275 an hour, her four-point PLAN: “p” is for “prioritizing,” the “l” is for the liberation of what you don’t need right into the bin (or an appropriate charity), “a” is for arranging what you’ve got left, and “n” is for the nurturing approach you’ll have to take to your life from here on in to make sure you don’t land yourself in another big pile of stuff.

There are other sorts of organizers, like Nick Kaczun’s Lustre, which started as a cleaning service, and evolved into an organizing outfit when he noticed, as he diplomatically puts it, a need among some of his repeat clients. Kaczun’s staff, being cleaners at heart, can get much more physical about it, and move stuff out en masse, cleaning your floors and countertops as they go.

But if you’re really attached to your stuff — or simply actually need it around for practical reasons — high-density storage may be the way to cure the heartbreak of Disorder Disorder and avoid the personal human failing that is the storage unit.

Developed for corporate uses, high-density storage mostly uses shelves on tracks that slide together like an accordion to multiply available storage space by up to four times. Spacefile in Etobicoke is one of two Canadian manufacturers of the units, which can be customized to work in even small condos, with interchangeable vinyl wraps to suit the décor. According to Paul MacLean, vice president of marketing and sales, these things can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

So if you do suffer from DD, call an organizer or get some of those cool slidey shelves; you have nothing to lose but your expired A&W coupon books, and maybe some old remotes. And is that Roll Up the Rim cup on your desk from last year? It’s so time to do this.

This content was produced by The Globe and Mail’s advertising department. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved in its creation.