01/31/03
ByJanie Nafsinger
 

PORTLAND - Sandy Carter Templeman’s health-care consulting business was all over the place. Literally.

Her file cabinet sat in the upstairs hallway. The computer that she shared with her husband, Dennis, was downstairs in a small room filled with their 3-year-old daughter’s toys.

And the family’s personal papers were … oh, forget it.

“It was a big mess. I was just overwhelmed,” says Templeman, who runs her business out of her Southeast Portland home.

She decided she needed help setting up an office. If she tried to do it by herself, “I wouldn’t have been as thorough,” Templeman figures.

“When you’re home-based, it’s easy for your home to not be a sanctuary for the business,” she adds. “It’s harder to define the area. You have to be more disciplined to work at home.”

Last August, Templeman saw professional organizing consultant Vicki Norris on television’s “A.M. Northwest” program, fired off an e-mail to Norris and hired her.

The result? The toys have disappeared from the small downstairs room, replaced by a his-and-her office equipped with two desks, the computer and a file system that Norris custom-designed for Templeman, who no longer juggles papers in her lap while working at the computer.

Templeman’s home office was featured on “A.M. Northwest” Oct. 1, and Norris has begun making regular appearances on the show the third Tuesday of every month.

Now that Norris has finished with Templeman’s home-based business, she is working on organizing other areas of the home, including the family’s papers.

“Organizing is not about cleaning or tidying up. It’s about priorities and investing time in what’s important,” says Norris, 29, Sherwood resident and founder of Restoring Order, the business that she started in April 1999.

“My trademark slogan is ‘reclaim your life.’ Organizing is an investment in your quality of life.”

Creating order out of chaos may come naturally to someone like Norris, who describes herself as highly detailed and people-oriented. But she has seen how a lack of order has tormented some of her clients.

“I have people who are crying when they open their door,” she says. “People who aren’t disorganized don’t see the life drain on those who are disorganized. They’re late paying their bills; there are family tensions. Your credibility is at stake when you’re in a professional environment.”

Home offices make up a big part of her business, but she also does corporate work and has a couple of national clients in Los Angeles and Arizona. She also has organized entire houses.

But her mission is always the same: to show her clients how to become the masters of their environments.

“This is crazy that we live in a country where people are stressed out because they have too much stuff, they have too many options,” Norris says.

When she takes on a client, Norris performs an assessment in which she learns what the client does for a living and what values are most important to him or her. She then designs a customized organizing system for each client. “I will create a custom system that’s intuitive to them,” she says. “Otherwise it won’t last.”

Norris also gives her clients “homework,” tasks such as going through files and labeling items. And she works with clients on time management. For example, a woman who admits she wishes she had more time for her husband might get a homework assignment from Norris to mark a “date night” with her spouse on the calendar.

Many people don’t manage their time well, Norris has found. “They have four calendars and have had a Palm Pilot for two years and don’t know how to use it.”

Sometimes reorganizing involves throwing things away, “but that’s not my job,” Norris says. “My job is to make room in their lives for what’s important.”

Clients won’t stay organized unless they put time into staying that way, she warns. “If you keep throwing your clothes on the floor instead of taking an extra couple of seconds hanging them up, your closet will be messy again.” Stewardship is one of her founding principles – “taking care of what you have,” she explains, “and being a good steward of your time, too.”

Norris wants her clients to continue using the systems that she has devised for them once she has moved on, she says. “I want to teach them to fish.”

A Sherwood resident since 1996, Norris grew up in Lake Oswego, graduated from the University of Puget Sound, where she majored in communication, and spent three years working in the nonprofit field for Search Ministries, a nondenominational ministry.

Then she was a real estate assistant for her ex-husband, an arrangement that didn’t end well but taught her that she could run her own business.

While searching for a new career, Norris thought long and hard about what she wanted to do. She realized she loved to organize things, and a friend suggested that she turn that into a job. “I thought, ‘Do people make a living at this?’ ” she recalls.

Not only is she making a living, but Restoring Order has boomed in the past six months, Norris notes. She is booked two months ahead and is starting to hire subcontractors. She is in her second year as president of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers.

And she still has her real estate license – her clients have included real estate agents who hire her to organize their offices.

She was on a Pacific Ocean cruise with her family when she met Trevor Norris of Troutdale. They got married, and Trevor, an electrician by trade, plans to join his wife in her business. They are working on developing a line of organization products, such as a paper sorter made of a wooden frame and stainless steel shelves.

The first product that Norris devised was a holiday reference binder, which holds everything from Christmas cards to gift lists to holiday menus. “I saw the need in my own life for this,” she says.

She lives what she preaches, she says. She is constantly clearing out her home and giving items to charity, and she has changed her filing system about three times in four years to find out what works best for her.

“No one is perfectly organized, including me,” Norris says. “It’s constantly self-maintenance. And life brings changes.”

INFORMATION, PLEASE

Where to see Vicki Norris: The third Tuesday of the month on “A.M. Northwest,” which airs at 9 a.m. weekdays on KATU Channel 2.

To learn more: Log onto Norris’ Web site, www.restoringorder.com