Everything in place

Before Yom Kippur, it may be a good idea to hire the big guns to deal with your home's contents.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Sarit Goshen 88 224 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Sarit Goshen 88 224
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have Mary Poppins come in at the end of the day, snap a few times and instantly transform your untidy mess of clutter into perfect order? No more stacks of papers tumbling out of cupboards, no toys littering the living room, no pots and pans crashing into each other in the kitchen closets. While Mary Poppins is fiction, Ofra Eitan and Sarit Goshen - whose organization Hakol Bamakom (Everything in Place) is in its 11th year - are very real. The two women (both 48) set up their home-organizing business in 1998 and have never looked back. They have organized hundreds of homes, developed systems to teach people to maintain their newfound tidiness and have literally changed people's lives. "When you go into a home and have to sort out years of things being hoarded, clothes going back decades, people's memories, it becomes very intimate. You have to be extremely sensitive as you are touching the core of their being. They have no protection; it's as if they are naked before you," says Eitan. "You can go to a shrink for 10 years," adds Goshen, "but you only tell him what you want and hide the rest. With us, in 10 minutes I know everything about you." For some people the thought of strangers going through their most private possessions is anathema, even if the end product is a blissfully tidy home. But Eitan and Goshen have rarely found resistance to their methods. Their clients include a dazzling list of celebrities and an interesting cross-section of society, but with many more Ashkenazim than Sephardim. Many psychologists use the service, and Eitan and Goshen feel it is because they know they have a problem and know how to buy help. One thing is sure - though the service does not come cheap, even people who could not be classed as wealthy often avail themselves of it. Order and efficiency, it seems, are necessities not luxuries. How did it all start? The two women had been friends since childhood and always wanted to do something together. While Eitan worked as a secretary, Goshen was a dental hygienist, and in their spare time they would get together and toss around ideas about starting a business. Nothing seemed to be common to their disparate professional backgrounds until one day Eitan was asked by an elderly aunt for help in moving into her new home. "I spent the entire day with her and by 7 p.m. everything was unpacked and in its place. My aunt said I should be doing it professionally. I called Sarit and told her I'd found the answer. I said, 'We have a business.'" At the time, neither woman knew of the existence of home organizing as a business which had already taken off in the US. They just followed their gut instincts, knew that they both had tidiness built into their veins and set up shop. Other than getting the word out that the company existed and was available for work, the overheads were minimal. "You need a ladder, a sharp knife to open boxes, a pair of overalls and some stickers," Goshen says. What you can't buy but still need is the innate ability to assess space and to arrange things in it. Says Eitan of Goshen: "If she says something won't go through a doorway, we don't even need to measure, she knows just by looking." And Goshen compliments Eitan: "She's the one who can look at a space and know how to make it look as aesthetic as possible." So in the summer of 1998 Everything in Place was launched. Family and parents all thought the two women were crazy. Their reaction was why should anyone pay for this? But Eitan's father encouraged them and even came up with the name of their business, which they say sums up the essence of what they do. "The amazing thing is that we had no idea this was an established business in the United States; we had never heard of it, and everything we did, we made up as we went along," Goshen says. "A few years after starting the business, we saw an Oprah show featuring professional organizers and they were doing it just like us. We thought we'd invented it." Luckily for the two entrepreneurs, a journalist friend wrote up their story - and it didn't take long for the business to take off. Television appearances followed, and their bright red overalls and original ideas caught the imagination of the media. WITH THE hindsight of 10 years, experience, they now acknowledge that starting the business took a lot of hutzpa. "We had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for," they say now. Ingenuity is often the name of the game. "Not long ago we were asked to give an estimate for a very messy house in Ra'anana," says Goshen. "We walked into this big house and in the kitchen everything was out on the marble counters, including the microwave even though a place had been built in for it. We asked the woman why she didn't at least put the microwave in its place, and she said the carpenter had made a mistake and it didn't fit." Goshen took out a screwdriver and removed the frame the carpenter had put around the hole. She slid the microwave in as the owner stood and watched open-mouthed. "Naturally we got the job," she says. "It's a bit like taking multi-vitamins. It's not enough to say that everything is going to be okay, you have to show results. But how many jobs are there out there where you get immediate satisfaction - in the morning a total mess, in the evening everything in place?" For organizing the customer's belongings they have an array of storage solutions and they can demonstrate how to fold clothing and linen to maximize the space available. But what happens when they come into a very cluttered place and the owners can't bear to part with the possessions they have hoarded for years and which usually have huge sentimental value? "We go to a place and we ask them why they want us and what expectations they have as to how their home will look when we've finished," Eitan says. "For us to succeed in the mission, the client's cooperation is a crucial element." The hardest part, as one would expect, is to persuade people to get rid of documents, souvenirs, bundles of old letters, school reports and exercise books yellowed with age, useless decorative objects of no value, beloved collections and all the detritus of long disorganized lives. This is especially necessary for older people with large houses who are moving to sheltered housing with far less available space. "We emphasize the reason they should get rid of stuff - because they are downsizing - and try to persuade them that just because something is old, it doesn't make it valuable or worth keeping. Do you want to live for today or live in your parents' house? And we have what we call the Mona Lisa principle," Goshen says. They invented this when they went to sort out the papers of a very old man and found a bundle of letters which he said were from his father. It turned out that the father had been a leader of the Zionist movement and an important personality in the pre-state Yishuv. "We told him that his letters were worth nothing to him if nobody knows they're sitting here in his cupboard. Just as if no one could look at the Mona Lisa it wouldn't be worth anything either." The old man was persuaded to donate the letters to a museum. "The principle can be applied to anything one is reluctant to part with," she adds. "So if you have old and historic documents, put them in an album where others can browse and enjoy them. If you have kept every birthday card your children sent you over the last 40 years with their cute bad handwriting and spelling lovingly preserved, do a selection, keep a few and jettison the rest. If someone has a beloved collection scattered around, we try to persuade them to display it properly if they don't want to part with it, so others can enjoy it too." "People often keep mountains of receipts and official papers because they think they might need to show them one day," Eitan notes. "One aspect of our work is to sort out offices and desks and we are aware of the rules much more than the average layperson and know how long you need to keep specific receipts and so on." Although well-established, things have not always gone smoothly. "Once a few years ago a wife wanted to surprise her husband and invited us to come and sort out his study," Goshen remembers. "We were halfway through the work when he came home unexpectedly and was absolutely horrified at our being there. It was worse than if he'd found her in bed with another man - he wanted to kill her and he threw us out unceremoniously. So from that we deduced that you can't ever use us to surprise a partner." Books can be a very problematic area for producing clutter. People cling to out-of-date textbooks, shelves of them, because they used them in university. "We can't force anyone to get rid of anything, but we point out that today, with the Internet, even the sets of encyclopedias are no longer necessary. Years ago everyone bought their Britannica or Judaica from door-to-door salesmen and they looked good on the shelves and people used them to settle an argument, but today no one needs them or uses them," says Eitan. Clothes are another battleground. Eitan and Goshen have a flexible rule that something not worn for three seasons should be jettisoned, but are prepared to relax the rule for that treasured Armani trouser suit you got in a sale and you might slim back into one day. "I can understand a woman wanting to keep a bikini she wore at 16 as a souvenir, but not six pairs of jeans she'll never get into again," says Goshen. "We once came up with the idea of telling a woman who didn't want to part with clothing that she should take a photo of it and that way she could get rid of it but still have it. We meant it as a joke, but it actually worked." In their own homes they are tidy, but not crazy, and they make a point of not driving their husbands and children mad by bringing their work home. "We personally are not compulsive although we employ staff and some of them might be slightly over the top," Eitan says. "We only use women to do the original sorting out - what we do is so intimate and private that it suits women better than men and the customers feel more comfortable with women. For moving, we have men packers who are expert at what they do. We wrap everything in newspaper, but without the print, which would come off and dirty things, and one of our workers is so fastidious and conscious of expense she reuses the paper, ironing it first." To become a staff worker for Everything in Place you need to be female, young enough and fit enough to be able to move heavy objects and have that gene that makes tidiness a part of your personality. If you don't have it, Eitan, Goshen and the ladies in red overalls are only a phone call away.