Guest Bedroom Transformation
Guest rooms unfortunately often become a dumping ground for a lot of things that you simply don’t know what to do with.
So when a client asked us to help her declutter and sort through everything in what used to be her son’s bedroom that still contained so many of his childhood memories in addition to a lot of other stuff, our Chief of Chaos to Calm spent approximately two hours tackling the space.
When she texted the client who was working from her home office in another part of the house that she was done, the client’s response was “NO WAY…THAT FAST???”.
Was it technically organized with everything put away?
No but that wasn’t the goal that day.
The client was convinced that 85% of what was in there could be tossed or donated.
She just didn’t have the bandwidth to do the actual sorting process, a step that always comes before you can actually implement any organizing systems and solutions.
This is what the room and closet looked like when Beth first walked in…
And after she was done, she left everything in various piles for the client to go through on her own…
A few days later Beth received these photos with a text that said “WE ARE SOOOOO HAPPY…THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU…WE NEVER COULD HAVE DONE THIS WITHOUT YOUR HELP!!!
While you can’t see the entire bed from the same angle as the “before” photo, it was completely empty and the piles everywhere were gone.
Biggest tips/takeaways?
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Don’t ever start “organizing” until you have sorted everything and know exactly what you are left with. Then and only then should look into organizing solutions like bins, baskets, shelving, etc.
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Engage your children in this process if they are old enough to make decisions about what they want to keep but don’t fall into the “parent trap” where you become the historian/archivist forever. At some point they need to take ownership and responsibility for their own memories and unless you feel you MUST have them in your possession, pass them down. Or figure out a way to preserve the memories in digital form and possibly then convert those images into small memory books that you can create using any of the digital platforms that you can find with a quick Google Search. Or reach out to a local company like Ambrosia Archiving or Step by Step Tech here in the Denver/Boulder area and let them do all the work for you if you aren’t tech savvy.