Organizing Your Garage with Kathi Burns and Fox5 News
(Transcript)
Arthelle Neville: Allrighty, I tell you what, this is exciting for me because I love to be organized. Kathi Burns is the number one in organization. You do this for a living and what we’re talking about this morning Kathi (good morning first of all)…
Kathi: Good morning!
Arthelle Neville: We’re talking about getting your garage in order. For folks at home, you know how messy your garage can get. So what we’ve done is we’ve chosen a cabinet, a cabinet here at Fox5 that simulates what you might have in your own garage at home. So this is how our stuff looks right now Kathi. How’s that look, is that horrible?
Kathi: This is typical muck.
Arthelle Neville: Typical muck? Which is just mess, right?
Kathi: A mess.
Arthelle Neville: Alright, so what we’re going to do…this is kind of fun…we’re going to have Kathi organize this live for us on television. But before we start, before you start kind of getting this together, and we’ll show you the results coming up very shortly, let’s talk about the steps because it’s something that’s easy but most people just don’t know how to tackle it.
Kathi: Absolutely. Well first you start by grouping the items together and then once you have them grouped. Like say we have the wires with the wires, the tapes with the tapes, then we’re going to sort them and figure out exactly how many there are in that category. Then we’re going to go ahead and containerize them and then put labels on them. So that again, people can figure out where things are going to go. You can see we have some semblance of organization here in the beginning, but what happened is they missed the step of containerizing. So without containers, things can’t really stay in their places.
Arthelle Neville: And then Kathi, what do you think of all the stuff we need to get rid of?
Kathi: That would be muck and that would be something that I’d say if you have things that you no longer use or that no longer serve you, let it go. Pass on your good, donate it to charity and then it helps you get unstuck and it helps you also move your good on to the world so to speak.
Arthelle Neville: Well we like that, pay it forward. Okay, so here is our mess, our muck as Kathi Burns calls it. She is the number one organizer here on our show and she’s going to get this thing all cleaned up. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to let you get started. I don’t want to be in your way, you go ahead and you get started and we’ll check in with Kathi shortly to see how you’re doing. Are you ready for this challenge or is this nothing for you?
Kathi: We’re on; it’s nothing!
Arthelle Neville: Game on!
Kathi: Game on!
Arthelle Neville: Alright Raoul, over to you now….
Raul: Knowing Kathi, she’ll be done in five minutes with that.
Arthelle Neville: True….
Okay but what you don’t want to do is hold the mess, right Kathi Burns?
Kathi: That’s right, get rid of the muck.
Arthelle Neville: Don’t hold on to the muck. Listen, Kathi Burns is here because she is the master of organization. She wrote a book about it, I’ll tell you about it in a second. So Kathi was here earlier, we’re talking about getting your garage at your home organized because you know it’s a mess, admit it. And Kathi, what we have done behind here we’re going to reveal in a moment. We sort of simulated our own garage cabinet, but you probably have something like this in your garage. So it was kind of a mess, Kathi cleaned it out. Do we have a ‘before’ now or are we just going to go for the ‘after?’
Alright, let’s do the reveal. Kathi, you do the honors. Let’s open the door. Whoo! Very nice. I tell you what, what did you do?
Kathi: Well what it is, you just need to sort into different categories. There were labels on the shelves but with so many hands in the closet so to speak, it’s better to have the actual labels on the bins and have bins that contain the different assortment of things. So that way when they pull out a cable or they pull out a video, they can just throw it right back in again and it keeps it contained and nice and neat and stacked.
Arthelle Neville: Now you know Kathi, most people are afraid to do this because it just seems insurmountable to try to get this stuff organized but you do have some steps we want to share with everybody again. You say number one, you group it together. Number two, you…
Kathi: Sort.
Arthelle Neville: Number three, you…
Kathi: Purge. That’s the most important thing. Get rid of the stuff.
Arthelle Neville: And then you…
Kathi: Classify, containerize, and then label it. And if it’s labeled, there should be no misunderstanding on where things go back. Because as you can see on the sign over here it says, “Clean up after yourself!”
Arthelle Neville: And the good news Kathi is that honestly…I love to be organized, so this is right up my alley…the good news is that honestly if you know where things are, you spend less time looking for them. So spend the time up front, get it organized, correct? And then later, you save a lot of time.
Kathi: Absolutely! And then you can do what you really want to do as opposed to organizing, and cleaning, and sorting.
Arthelle Neville: Yeah, yeah. Well listen, Kathi Burns knows a thing or two about this, she wrote a book about it. It is called “How to Master Your Muck.” You know, pick it up because Kathi was here before and cleaned out our executive producer’s desk and made that look wonderful, and now you’ve given us some tips here, and you know what? I like it; you did a good job!
Kathi: Thank you very much!
Arthelle Neville: Alright Kathi Burns, thank you so much!
Kathi: I appreciate it.
Arthelle Neville: Yeah, yeah. Raoul over to you now.
