If you want a drawer filled with junk, "junk drawer" is an apt name. If you want a free room in which you can dump all your delayed decisions, create a "dumping room." If you want a closet cluttered beyond epic proportions, call yours "the horror closet" and you'll be well on your way. The names we use for things matters. I don't think this just because I'm a writer and an organizer (though that ...

Not too long ago, I had an encounter with an incredibly angry woman. That day, I was working at a storage facility where my client has a unit. I arrived first, and parked in one of the five spots available before the security gate. When my assistant arrived, we opened my trunk, pushed aside the many bags of donation from the day prior, and perched on the edge to wait for my client. So there ...

Somewhere in Connecticut, a woman and her three daughters are living in an impossibly dreamy cottage. The woman is designer Raquel Garcia, the house, a pet project of sorts. Raquel bought the house, built in the early 1950s, from its original owner (a woman with three daughters; dig the poetry of that). In an impressively short eight weeks, Raquel had taken the house down to its studs and then gave it new life. Under Raquel's ...

You know those "My favorite picks from the Shopbop/Nordstrom Anniversary sale!" posts that all your favorite bloggers regularly publish? I don't know about you, but I have no time for them. Don't get me wrong, I respect the hustle, but I also cannot pretend said posts do anything other than to trigger a rolling of my eyes. It feels like such a painfully obvious attempt to suckle at the big consumer machine teat (that sentence ...

A close relative of mine married an incredibly unstable individual. There were red flags all along: constant arguments, disrespectful communication that may, at times, have bordered on verbal abuse. It was evident to pretty much everyone (besides my relative) that this girl might not have been the best pick. Predictably, the relationship soured beyond the point of repair. A couple of years and a toddler later, the marriage ended in divorce and a heavily contentious ...