No matter how challenged you are by life's ordinary tasks, you can find someone to help you with them these days. A Chesterton woman has started a business that helps people who are overwhelmed by all the stuff they accumulate. If you contact 123 Clutterfree Me, Lisa Brickley will charge you a mere $50 an hour to help you "realize your vision" for de-cluttering the house:
I really enjoy doing it," Brickley said. "Sometimes people move because they feel that their house doesn't have enough space. The economy is a little rough right now. If people de-clutter and use the space they have, they realize they may not have to move if they're feeling liked they're cramped."
As a clutter king myself, I admire Brickley's ability to help others with this dilemma. But her method seems to involve way too much work -- there's a whole lot of sorting and labeling and boxing and carting stuff down to the basement or up flights of stairs to storage areas, not to mention labeling each box according to season and deciding which stuff can be hauled of to Goodwill. Phew! That's a lot more work than it took to accumulate the stuff in the first place. That just sort of happens. You start out with a 600-square-foot living room, and the next thing you're know, you're trying to keep your balance while tiptoeing through the only narrow aisle of open space left, careful not to cause an avalanche that topples everything into one giant heap.
As it happens, I've already "realized my vision" of de-clutterization. It just took getting to an age where most of the stuff I have bores me, and achieving enough wisdom to realize that if something has been boxed in the attic for 20 years, I'm probably really not going to rediscover it and have a good time with it all over again in the next few days. As one women in the story says, "It feels as good to get rid of stuff as it does to get it."
