Home-Office Transformation

Mission: Organization : Episode MSO-409 -- More Projects »
Ellyn Adler has a creative bent that takes up two rooms of the home she shares with husband Hilly. She enjoys crafting pillows, purses and clothing, but there are so many piles of fabric, patterns, notions, yarn and unfinished projects lying around that it is difficult to find the desk or sewing machine.

Her husband has trouble finding space to watch television or work at the computer, and if he does find a seat, he has to watch out for pins or knitting needles!

Photo

This vibrantly colored craft room stores yarn, fabric, patterns, magazines, sewing and knitting machines and dozens of unfinished projects.
Photo

An attempt at organization has been made, but the shelves are too close together and there are too many of them to actually be effective.
PHOTO

The adjacent room contains craft overflow and very little in the way of organization.
The mess even spills over into an adjacent second room, which has become a full-on storage and catchall facility. Besides more piles of yarn and fabric, a stack of old clothes that Ellyn no longer wears has been collecting dust for a year and a half!

An idea for starting a new sewing business from home has Ellyn ready to get things in order and master the art of organization. She clearly needs help in this area, so she turns to professional organizer Diane Albright for help.

Albright welcomes the challenge and steps in with a plan: Use the larger room for craft production and the smaller room for the office. This way, the rooms will be functional for Ellyn and will provide a pleasant environment for Hilly to enjoy at the same time.

The first step is to move all the office equipment into one room and consolidate and sort the remaining craft materials for storage in the other room. Everything is sorted into one of four piles: throw away, put away, give away, and another day (for those items difficult to place). Any project that has not been worked on in six months is thrown away.

Also in this Episode