OC family’s room gets a special makeover

By Matthew Graham  
The Oregon City News, Feb 19, 2008

Matthew Graham / Oregon City News
Vicki Norris discussed various options for the room she and her team
were going to renovate, considering how each would complement or
allow for greater functionality of other areas in the house.

At points, the boxes reached two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, myriad plastic bins of various sizes filled with post-it notes, pens and other office supplies. The towering bookshelves along one wall were lined with a decade’s worth of construction and development industry manuals, remnants that hadn’t been used in months, if not years.

The room that had previously served as a family room, a guest room for children home from college and, finally, as an office had become a place to store whatever didn’t fit anywhere else.

It had also become storehouse for things the family didn’t want to, or couldn’t, face.

Vicki Norris sat at the head of a long table lined back to the kitchen with her remodeling team. With her PDA and Bluetooth keyboard, she shot off questions and recorded the answers.

“What is working in that space?” Norris asked.

“Nothing’s working in that space,” said Susan Trone.

Kristin Trone, Susan’s daughter, interjected. “The only time I go in there is to put stuff in there.”

Norris runs a company called Restoring Order. With her team – she employs eight – she helps people organize their homes.

“The whole process that we follow is a very organic process,” Norris told the Trones before the question and answer, or “discovery” process. “We’re just going to let this project develop because that’s how it’s going to end up best for you.

The Trones had won a contest put on by Restoring Order through the television show “A.M. Northwest,” on which Norris has a show twice a month.

“Once a year we do a team project where we select a viewer and we go in as a team. It’s kind of a community service for us, it kind of let’s people know there’s hope. They’re embarrassed, they don’t want people to know how they live,” Norris said of people whose homes or part of their homes may be disorganized.

“It’s good to help them realize that they’re not the only ones.”

The Trones won the contest by submitting their room – the former college crash pad and family room. Its last function had been as an office for Susan Trone’s husband, Gene Trone, who died last May in an accident while working on the house during a remodel.

“Everything’s kind of up in the air, so much stuff has been thrown in there,” Susan Trone said. “Part of it was that that had become a dumping ground [during the remodel], but part of it was the emotional attachments. Most of that stuff was my husband’s stuff – it became a storage room because I didn’t want to face it.”

But Norris said that the intervention of her team helped the Trones come to terms with that by being an impartial but compassionate intermediary.

“Basically Gene’s consulting business had been dissolved and so Susan had all this letterhead and envelopes and Susan had a hard time letting go of that because it’s the end of the business,” Norris said. “By us coming in there and being a third party and having a process, we were able to help her realize that.

“We just kind of came in and took a very emotional space that represented her husband’s domain and dissected that space in a very respectful way … I think that’s very important, is recognizing what’s important now, not what was important or what’s going to be important 20 years from now.”

At first, the process seemed on the surface a purely physical one. The team had come to the Trones, in northeast Oregon City, to redo a room in disarray. Norris, at the dining room table, talked to the family about the general space situation throughout the house. Initially Susan Trone had wanted the refurbished space at least partly as her office. Norris brought up the possibility of converting the more formal and seldom used living room into a more inviting family room, leaving the subject room to be used for some other purpose.

Norris conferred that to fix a single room was not the point if it didn’t complement the rest of the house.

“If it makes sense for this to be just a family space and Susan’s office, we want to honor that,” she said. “If it makes sense for it to be a homework room, we want to honor that. You really don’t want to have more than two things per room. Some people say, ‘this is my living room, work room, craft room, sewing room and scrap-booking room,’ and then they wonder why they can’t get organized.”

As the group toured the house following the discovery process, the physical aspects came to light. Susan Trone already had a great office space with towering bookshelves, a desk and a computer. The issue, or one option, then became drawing the children away from that space and dedicating it to their mother.

But what came out during the discovery process was the real reason for the room makeover and the reason Norris talked in terms of service and helping.

Through Norris’ series of questions, Susan Trone reached her own revelations.

“Not being organized always hangs over your head as something that’s unfinished,” she said. “If I would get organized it would really free me to do other things I need to do.”

“You’ve just landed on the very reason we do business,” Norris responded. “It’s about freedom.”

Following the remodel, Susan Trone, who said prior to her husband’s death had never had to pay bills, let alone support a family, spoke of the remodel in terms of personal growth, carrying forward that previous revelation.

“It does cross one big thing off my list,” she said. “It’s sort of like there’s certain hurdles that I have to get through. I had to get a roof on the house, et cetera, and then you start on the stuff you dumped [in that room]. This remodel turned all those spaces into kind of a dumping ground. It’ll help me once I get over those hurdles, whether it’s cleaning out that paper work or setting up my own financial system.”

“I defined myself before in a partly different way than I do now, but it’s hard to work on that. It’s like clearing out the cobwebs in your brain … to me I can’t really even think about, should I be going back to school to get a master’s degree or should I be focusing on working” until I get this space cleared, she said.

Norris talked about the various kinds of disorganization. The most common, she said, is situational, in which “a life event imposes itself on you.” She said the Trones had seen four such events – a new job, a remodel, a death in the family and the birth of a new child, that of Susan Trone’s oldest daughter Mardi, in the last year.

“Situational disorganization I think is the most common and it can last years,” Norris said. “Some people moved eight years ago and never recovered. The first step is really just helping them realize all of the many factors that have contributed to their disorganization.”

“Most organizers are like chopping the top off the bushes – it looks good for a while, but it doesn’t last because you’re not pulling out the root,” she said. “That’s the only way we’re going to help people experience long-term change.”

And change, she said, really leads to personal freedom.

“I think the main thing is sort of this emotional freedom, and it’s different for every family – for some people it’s literally financial freedom … freedom to have guests over to their house because their dining room table was covered, freedom looks different for each family, but for this family it’s about emotional freedom.

By the time they finished touring the house and came upon the room to be redone, the family and Norris’ team had realized that they had no real meeting space; the living room was too formal, the dining room small and multi-purposed, although it was where they had watched movies together. Kristin Trone said she ended up doing her homework in the kitchen most of them time, until her mother made her clear out so she could fix dinner.

As they finally all stood amid the boxes, letterhead and manuals, Norris, Kristin Trone and her brother, Matt, were lobbying for a family space. A couch, television and mini fridge would make it ideal for the family to hang out in, a computer and printer for the children would draw them away from what would be dedicated as mom’s work space.

Finally the other two, Susan and Mardi Trone, gave in and the team set about clearing and then rebuilding the room.

Norris said the result was exactly what the family needed.

“Harmony, literally household harmony is returned, or maybe comes in for the first time after they’ve organized their space,” she said. “It’s just a space that light has been breathed back into.”