STYLE Savvy: Reality Check

Lisa Hess moves from chiding herself to reminding herself of the importance of taking small steps.

Every once in a while, there’s a post I’m a little embarrassed to write: one that reminds me that even for people who write about organization and know a little something about it, the process is a fully human pursuit with that often fails to yield perfect, permanent solutions. We can identify our styles, improve our living and working spaces, and increase our efficiency, but life brings changes, along with a constant flow of stuff into our homes, and we are often just one change away from rethinking everything entirely.

For me, that change came in the form of a home improvement project. After years of doing all the painting and wallpapering ourselves, we decided to outsource the painting of two rooms in our house — one upstairs and one downstairs. 

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

The Preparation

In order to make this happen, we needed to move everything except large pieces of furniture and the contents of closets and drawers out of both rooms. It probably goes without saying that all of this got moved into adjacent rooms, which already had their own fair share of large pieces of furniture and various accoutrements. Luckily, those rooms could withstand the additions, but it wasn’t pretty. 

Still isn’t. Weeks later (this is the embarrassing part), my house is still in that chaotic, please-don’t-stop-by-unannounced state. In my defense, we moved from the painting project to the last week of my summer class to preparation for vacation to vacation to return from vacation.

That vacation routine is a blog unto itself. 

Unexpected Emotions

I was prepared (sort of) to move everything back. What I wasn’t prepared for was how lovely, pristine, and uncluttered those freshly painted rooms would look and, as a result, how little I’d want to disturb those clear spaces with all the other stuff I thought I wanted to keep.

While most people would just put everything back, I am truly a take small steps kind of girl in these situations. Most people would see the clutter, recognize that it’s a problem, and rectify the situation. Me? I see the blank canvas of the freshly painted spaces and want every item that is returned to those spaces to truly need to be there. This requires time to think and assess, something that’s been in short supply as I entered grades and went on a vacation that allowed me to temporarily leave all the misplaced stuff both out of sight and out of mind.

But now I’m back. And it’s still here. And it’s time to take those small steps.

For me, this means sorting through the boxes and baskets one at a time and deciding what will earn its keep, and what to do with the rest. For now, I’m setting myself a goal of one box or basket a day, hoping momentum will take over and I’ll actually keep working through more than that once I get started. It’s a small goal for sure, but that’s an intentional hedge against the procrastination that too large a goal is likely to trigger when a project is overwhelming, as this one is. 

It's a Process

When I wrote Know Thyself: The Imperfectionist’s Guide to Sorting Your Stuff, I readily admitted that I was an organizational work-in-progress. That was one of the things that made me want to write about organizing; I was all too familiar with the crushing feeling that comes from feeling as though there’s a skill everyone else has that I don’t. But the thing is, we all have the skills. Life just challenges them sometimes. 

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to remind myself of something I’ve been saying all along. Organizing is a process, and a process is rarely one and done. And, when we emerge on the other side, we often know more about ourselves — not to mention organizing — than we did when we began.

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Copyright 2026 Lisa Hess
Images: Canva