During this time of year, we begin to see a resurgence in yard sales, closet purges, and spring cleaning before the hectic pace of summer sets in. Don’t let it overwhelm you—House Peace, a Birmingham-based organization company—offers some great tips for managing the mess.
“One of our biggest passions at House Peace is teaching our clients about the practice of “chaos resilience” in their everyday lives,” says founder Tara Bremer. Chaos resilience is returning to your organization system when chaos happens. “Because chaos continues to happen, even after we get organized. It’s a reminder not to panic, but to get back to the plan and utilize your personal magic ingredients for restoring order,” she says. Tara notes that It’s not just about getting organized, but it’s also teaching your brain how to recall what to do when the organization falls apart.
Before you unleash the label maker on your house, take time to revisit some of the organization systems already in place. Tara suggests asking questions such as:
Is this shoe bin still meeting the needs of my family, or do we need to look for something that works better?
Why are the coats piled up in the place where we keep soccer supplies?
I can never find a phone charger in this house. Didn’t they all used to be in one spot?
“You don’t have to throw everything out and start over completely,” Tara says. “Just perform a little maintenance and return to the systems you have put in place.”
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Colleen Dixon, a House Peace organizer who lives in New York City, also references chaos resilience when giving her apartment a refresh. “One thing that is certain no matter what your life is like is that there will be moments or even seasons of chaos,” she says. “Maybe your kids are in a sport that dictates your life every year for a couple of months, or maybe a loved one gets sick, and you’re focused on caring for them for a period. Maybe your daily life feels a bit chaotic on the regular, like mine does from the hours of 3-7 p.m. in the post-school, pre-bedtime survival hours. No matter how or why you experience chaos, the fact is that we all do, so it’s important that we implement systems when we have the capacity to do it so that we can go back to those systems when we feel overwhelmed with life.”
Colleen notes the most important aspect of chaos resilience is that everything must have a home. “When things don’t have a home, how do we know where to put them when we’re ready for our space to be peaceful once again? This can look different for everyone, but the goal is for you (or anyone in your home) to be able to pick up an item and know where it goes when it needs to be put away,” she says.
Next up: labeling. “Labeling is an important part of the process, because it reminds you and everyone else in your house where the designated home is for each item,” says Colleen. “So, if you’ve decided that the children’s art supplies belong in a lidded bin on a shelf in their closet, that lidded bin should be labeled “art supplies,” so that you, your spouse, your children, and any potential babysitters all know exactly where to put the crayons and markers when it’s time to tidy.” One of the places Colleen finds labeling to be especially helpful is her kitchen “admin” drawer. “This drawer—often referred to as a “junk drawer,” but do we really want junk in our home?)—houses many items that don’t necessarily have another place to live and that we access often, such as pens and pencils, paper clips and rubber bands, scissors, etc. Because six people live in our home and not all six of us can read the labels I’ve put on the organizers in the drawer, it occasionally gets a bit disheveled. Thanks to labels, I can quickly and easily put everything back where it belongs when the drawer gets out of hand, or I can ask another person to do it, because the organizing work already happened, and we just need to get back to how it was when the work was initially done.”
“Chaos has a tendency to paralyze us,” Colleen says. “Sometimes it’s because our brains simply can’t function at full capacity because of the emotional or logistical burden we’re carrying, and sometimes it’s because we must prioritize whatever is urgent and everything else is just going to have to wait for another day. If we allow ourselves to create a space that is resilient to that chaos during a season that is calmer, when the stuff hits the fan later, we can almost brainlessly enter back into that peaceful space because we set it up in such a way that is easy to recover.”
For more information about chaos resilience, organization, or to schedule a consult with House Peace, visit
housepeace.net, or follow them on Instagram @house.peace.