As the renovation finally winds down, I'm in need of a little (OK, a lot of) organizational help, so I headed to this weekend's Richmond Home and Garden Show to hear extreme cleaner extraordinaire and A&E star Matt Paxton, who doesn’t bill himself as a therapist or someone who is letter-perfect.
He’s far from it. He’s a former gambler who at 25 lost everything. He had to rebuild his life and finances. He started by cleaning attics and garages for the elderly. Ten years later, he’s built a Richmond-based business called Clutter Cleaner that employs six, and a serendipitous referral by Oprah’s staff landed his company on A&E’s show Hoarders.
Now he’s booked for a year, and he flies around the country, taping segments for the show, cleaning out local messes and helping people move, most recently from San Francisco to Richmond. What he does on the job site is say things aloud that most of his clients already know.
Paxton emphasized that far more shame is associated with hoarding than with alcoholism. “Tell someone you are a hoarder, and people think you are a freak.” Hoarding is an illness, he emphasizes. “For hoarders, their collections are their family. Items don’t leave or hurt you. There is no risk with stuff.”
For the organizationally challenged, he shared 10 of his rules when assessing items and clutter:
- There is a difference between need and want.
- How does this item make my life better?
- It’s OK to say no to an item.
- Love is time, not stuff.
- Stop lying to yourself.
- Take out what you bring in.
- Remove things from the bag immediately. (“You’d think Hoarders was sponsored by Target,” he quips.)
- Place things with other like items.
- Stop with the bins already. “Shoving stuff into boxes or bins is not organizing.”
- Every item must have a home.
The weeks ahead will bring paint to the adjacent dining room (the green is going bye-bye in favor of Benjamin Moore’s cloud white), the entry hall (a light but dusky purple) and our bedroom (Benjamin Moore’s ashwood gray cut in half).
This Unseemly House owner is finally coming out of her early fall funk. Great finds have been spotted at V for the Home (killer desk chairs), Fraîche (sculptural ceramic ware by Milani in black, red and white), Antiques on Broad (midcentury lamps from Maurice Beane), and Ruth and Ollie (terrific lacquered nesting tables.) More to come this week ...
I've inherited not one but two plain-Jane mantels at The Unseemly House. One resides in the living room, with its Colonial-style dentil molding cackling back at me. The other is in the family room and is about as plain as you can get — a wall of brown brick with no shelf to rest even a match on. To make matters worse, the fireplace spans the corner of the room.
Leave it to the store-display artists at Anthropologie to come up with a worthy fireplace front. Constructed from stained boards stacked horizontally, this fireplace warms its corner of the Stony Point store.
While I've thought slate, steel or tile for my mantels, none have the depth and texture of these boards. I can envision the boards all being whitewashed, too.
A Carytown business consulted on a project that will be highlighted tonight at 11 p.m. on HGTV's My Big Amazing Renovation. According to the folks at Sally Fretwell Paint, Sally participated in this project through her affiliation with myGreenCottage, a Reston-based company. She worked with Falls Church homeowner Anjoli Hansen on choosing all the paint colors for her home's "green remodel." Additional air dates and description are listed here.
Recently, Sally also worked with Ed Begley Jr., the environmental activist, actor and star of Planet Green's Living with Ed, as well as the spokesman for myGreenCottage. Earlier this year, she consulted with Begley and his wife, Rachelle Carson, and provided paint for a remodel that they did to their home in California.
Restoration Hardware's new Outdoor Sale catalog, filled with colorful umbrellas and gorgeous slabs of teak wood, made me want a courtyard even more. Our home is perfect for it. L-shaped and on a corner lot, the house and its attached garage (each one side of the L) would open right into this space. The only problem: an asphalt driveway that can't be recoated. So that means choosing to build a fence on top of it or wait and rip it all out.
Over the weekend, I was in Midlothian, and The Garden Place (378-8076) actually made me think that something could be done sooner (this fall) rather than later (several thousand dollars and next year). With some window boxes, an arbor and trellises, they made their paved space into something to be proud of.
