A critical eye can help you cut through the clutter

The late great comedian George Carlin liked to say, "A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it." That made us laugh because we knew how we relentlessly amass stuff — once important and perhaps costly stuff that somehow evolved into junk piled on tabletops, shoved in corners and beneath sofas, and captured into random bins.

With too much stuff and too little organization, we wind up with a haphazard landscape that hides the very things we feel the need to keep.

And nobody can amass stuff quicker than a 3-year-old girl with loving parents and grandparents. That's why Seattle's Heather Scearce hired a professional organizer to help sort through her daughter's bedroom.

The 15-by-15-foot room was crammed with objects intended to keep her busy, learning and happy. There were dolls, little chairs, an easel, miniature piano, shelves of puppets and tiaras, bins of books and plastic containers, drawers of random puzzle pieces and art, a dollhouse still in the box.

It had become too much for both Mom and daughter, Eva. But where to start? What's junk? What could be sold? What should be donated? What had the girl outgrown? What would she miss? What to keep? And how would they organize things instead of just rearranging piles?

Scearce opened two Pilates studios in the last year, and her husband is an equally busy Internet provider executive. Both are creative. Neither is handy or especially organized. She decided she needed an organizer's detached viewpoint to combat sentimentality and the "this-might-come-in-handy-someday" inner voice.

She also made sure her daughter was gone when she invited in Amy Gray, of the organizing business Empty Your Nest (www.emptyyournest.com/).

Where to start

Gray typically presses a client to evaluate each object by asking three questions:

• Do I love this? Not like. Love.

• Do I use it? In the past year?

• Do I need this? Really need?

If you can't answer yes to any of those, it should go.

That might strike some as severe — and there is wiggle room — but clutter is stuff so meaningless that you don't even have a proper place for it.

"When people go through their objects, they have an emotional connection," Gray says. "An organizer doesn't have that same sort of relationship so can offer different perspective. I try to help people view their objects more consciously so they can control their objects instead of their objects controlling them."

That said, Gray also was mindful that moms like Scearce are allowed to have emotional connections to the back stories behind certain objects.

They started in the closet, with Scearce pulling out individual outfits, some of which had rarely been worn before outgrown. Under Gray's watch, Scearce separated the to-go items into three plastic bags: for a consignment shop, to donate, to toss.

Then Gray pressed Scearce to consider the room's function. Scearce said the girl loved art, so Gray began carving space to accommodate a big easel.

Gray also began getting books out of floor bins and into a bookcase that held dolls, puppets and tiaras. That got Scearce sorting through the books and separating them into the giveaway pile and those destined for the bookcase. From there, Scearce tackled toys and papers, each of which had a story, like Eva's first rainbow drawing. Gray, said, "You can keep it; let's just find a good spot for it and other important papers."

Soon, several donation bags dotted the room. The idea was to get the junk into Scearce's car so she would not have a chance to reintroduce it. Many of us start cleaning clutter but wind up just moving it around.

They stopped for the day after two hours (at $80 an hour, though charges vary from company to company), about three-quarters through the job.

Discovering anew

When Eva returned home and walked into her room, she noticed the change — and rediscovered all her forgotten books and toys.

"She really seemed to love the change," Scearce said later. "But she would have screamed if she had been there watching her stuff go."

Eva is like most of us that way. We keep stuff because we think it is valuable, at least garage-sale or eBay valuable. We keep things because our parents gave them to us. One of the main reasons we have stuff we never use is the notion that we might some day. Usually, say organizers, you never do. In fact, too much stuff hides the stuff you really need or want.

"My husband and I are the type of people who can't find a hammer when we need one," says Scearce. "So we go out and buy a hammer and later find out we have five hammers."

Richard Seven: 206-464-2241 or rseven@seattletimes.com