Then and Now: Organizing in a Pandemic
March 17th and 18th, 2020: Los Angeles had mostly shut down. Everyone was panicking, grocery store shelves were empty, half of the city was already tucked away safely in their homes. A client had called a few days earlier: she and her boyfriend broke up and she was moving into an apartment alone: could we help her unpack before the world went into hiding? She was overwhelmed and not sure how to do it herself. My immediate answer, yes.
March 12th, 2020
I ran into Whole Foods for some dinner ingredients and left empty handed.
Armed with a bag full of supplies: purell, lysol, gloves, (no masks!), my team and I spent two full days unpacking and folding and transforming her apartment into a home. It was refreshingly fun to forget what was happening outside those walls, to have a singular purpose of helping one more person feel settled in her space, a final mission of sorts. I left at the end of the second day with a backseat full of returns (and no open Container Stores to return to), but with a feeling of accomplishment. This is why we do what we do.
Looking back, that job feels like a rite of passage, a line drawn in the sand between the before times and now. Over the next two months, home became an oasis. I am one of the lucky ones with a yard and an endless curiosity for projects, so I was thrilled to have a vast expanse of time to rest and explore and learn. I jumped on the sourdough train and baked tirelessly. I felt like I had space to really listen and think for the first time in my whole life. It became clear to me that I wanted to change something moving forward, I wanted to live more intentionally, more slowly, and I wanted to build something that was bigger than myself.
When summer rolled around, we felt like it was safe to start organizing in homes again (masked, etc.) and we tip-toed back into the world. It was such a delight to be with my team and to resume transforming spaces for clients, many of whom had struggled being locked up for months. I also started working with Coach Julia, a former organizer-turned-coach, and she helped me begin to clarify my goals both for myself and Space Camp.
“Looking back, that job feels like a rite of passage, a line drawn in the sand between the before times and now.”
While many clients were happy to have us organize in person, the majority of people weren’t ready to take that step. Enter: virtual organizing. I took on a handful of clients in the summer and fall of 2020 where I would FaceTime with them to look at their space, talk through goals and ideas, and then I’d put together a plan they could follow themselves. It was definitely a challenge for me, I felt like an octopus with all of my tentacles tied up, and I wanted so badly to reach through the screen and just do the work myself. But I pushed through and found the words to explain and teach my clients how to organize for themselves, and guess what: it worked. The spaces my clients were organizing, with a little bit of focused guidance, were great. They were functional and beautiful and transformative and it was like a lightbulb went off in my brain: people can do this for themselves! They just need a little bit more hand-holding than what’s currently available to them.
And just like that, the idea to make an organizing course was born.
Back in real life though, things were busy. Our client base had realized their homes were too small or too messy (or both!) and we were booking jobs left and right. After organizing all day, every day, I would go home at night and create invoices and write proposals and then collapse from exhaustion. I was so grateful to have work after several months of not making much income, but I also was close to burnout. I decided it was time to hire a director of operations, and after interviewing twenty candidates over zoom (which honestly was like a full time job for a couple of weeks), I hired Megan. It felt like a huge risk for me financially, but it was time to take a chance and move forward - there was no way to grow without this leap.
Megan Holmquist
Director of Operations
Megan came at the exact right time: she helped take the huge weight of admin tasks off of my shoulders and launch into a season of big projects. With COVID still ever-present, buying the supplies and products we needed to organize every day was a challenge, and my garage became a pseudo storage unit for mounds of baskets and bins. Scheduling was also a complicated game of tetris, and Megan and I would sit at my picnic table with our laptops and daydream about having an office with a huge whiteboard to help work out the puzzle. One of those days we decided to hop onto a local office rental website...and the next month we were moving into our very own space.
Space Camp Headquarters
Just as Covid-19 was ramping up in LA in terrifying numbers (1 in 5 people were testing positive in my neighborhood), we made the decision to suspend in-home organizing until things were safer. This was in mid-December 2020, and it coincided with the move to our office. We took the month to move in slowly, to paint, and to transfer our carloads of organizing materials from my house to our beautiful new headquarters.
“If our homes are organized, calm, and creative, then so are we.”
Because I’m not one to sit still for that long, January felt like the opportunity had finally come to make my dream of creating an organizing course a reality. Megan and I mapped out the course and made a plan to start shooting the videos. I spent every spare moment in January and early February working and re-working the course materials. At the end of February we shot all of our footage in two (very, very long) days, and then I started the process of shaping the videos with our editor.
The next few months were a blur. Moves, space transformations, photo shoots, new clients, and everything in between. All spare moments were filled with me creating extra content for the course: worksheets, the quiz, shopping lists, guides, and inspiration boards.
“For a few months last year, I had a taste of a slower life, and it was extraordinary.”
Once my husband and I were vaccinated, we traveled to Kansas to help my dad organize his home, and then to Syracuse to help my husband’s parents organize and pack up before a move. I even snuck in a short trip to Kansas City to meet my new baby nephew and set his nursery up with my sister. It has been an exhausting whirlwind, but also so necessary. I’d spent the past year worried and stressed about my dad and wanting to help my family, and being able to get my hands dirty and work hard to help them has been an important milestone in moving past such a difficult year.
And now here we are, nineteen months later, in a completely new yet strangely familiar place…almost like I fell asleep in March 2020 and now I’ve suddenly woken up and no time has passed at all. But I have changed (and more than the addition of an unprecedented amount of grey hair on my head). For a few months last year, I had a taste of a slower life, and it was extraordinary. In the months I stayed home, I was more well-rested and calm and present than I’ve ever been in my adult life. I learned to appreciate my home itself, to treat it kindly and lovingly, like a family member. I realized that a lot of my rushing around wasn’t actually getting me anywhere. Ironically, soon after this revelation, things got extremely busy but I’ve been attempting, day after day, to continue to live in a more slow and intentional way.
“...if you’re looking for inspiration, dive into that messy closet of yours, I promise it will help.”
And this new way of thinking has reinforced the why behind Space Camp. I firmly believe true peace and happiness start at home. If our homes are organized, calm, and creative, then so are we. Home deserves to be an oasis, a place for you to rest and enjoy your time with people you care about. And if your home doesn’t feel great to you right now, deciding you want to change things is such an exciting opportunity. Making decisions about which things are adding to the life you want and which are depleting it is an exercise that not only helps you transform your space into something beautiful, but it also doubles as this magical therapy session. Anytime I feel stuck in my life, I just clean out a drawer and let the universe do the rest (seriously).
I firmly believe true peace and happiness start at home.
So here we are, on the other side of a pandemic, standing stronger and brighter than before. I’m not perfect, and I still have a long way to go towards my dream of living a slower and more creative life, but I am well on my way. And if you’re looking for inspiration, dive into that messy closet of yours, I promise it will help.
