No Storage? No Problem: Decluttering for Historic Homes
Kay Morrison, founder of Occasional Wife, in the French Quarter shop, 624 Dumaine Street
April 2024Occasional Wife founder Kay Morrison and two of her veteran organizers share favorite pointers for simplifying life in historic homes.
– by Bethany Ewald Bultman
photos by Ellis AndersonTidying is the act of confronting yourself. – Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Easter heralds the beginning of festival season in New Orleans – when our collection of sun hats and mud-clomping footwear claim pride of place in our limited storage spaces. Simultaneously, those of us who live in historic homes contemplate where to cram our out-of-season winter clothing and Mardi Gras regalia – with as much enthusiasm as we have filing our tax returns.
Last year, while researching for a previous article, “Confessions of a Recalcitrant Declutterer,” I rediscovered an eye-opening, century-old adage quoted by Sara Bereika, founder of Sara Jane Organizing:
Most of us only wear 20 percent of what we own 80 percent of the time.
During that deep dive into decluttering research, I’d also found numerous academic articles – like this one, “Why Mess Causes Stress: The Mental Cost of Clutter.” Research is clear on the psychological benefits of decluttering: increased energy and less stress. I came to understand that the problem isn’t so much about creating extra storage as learning to live with less.
I was amused when one reader of my “Confessions” article made her own confession to me – it prompted her to get rid of all of her beds. What, you may ask, did her beds have to do with solving the dilemma of too much stuff? I learned that by replacing her beds with high-off-the-floor, skirted four-poster beds, she gained additional clothing storage areas.
While ingenious, it still seemed to exemplify that phrase “Stuff you don’t need in a place you can’t find it.” Hence, this follow-up article on the benefits of seeking professional organizational assistance.
Luckily, around the corner from our French Quarter office is a thriving vintage shop owned by The Occasional Wife – a multi-faceted local company that helps improve lives through simplification. The business was envisioned sixteen years ago by native-New Orleanian Kay Morrison, a former global account executive for Starwood Resorts.
Kay Morrison
Like so many working women, Kay continually juggled one or two more balls than she had hands for. Not that Kay wasn’t resourceful. She acquired passports for her newborns so she could breastfeed them on her business trips out of the country. In her rare moments of repose, she conjured the illusion of a helpful genie who could simultaneously fill the roles of housekeeper, button sewer, executive assistant, cheerleader, and interior designer.
It was Kay’s husband who once jokingly advised her that the answer to her prayers would be “an occasional wife.”
The seed was planted. Kay’s first step was to open The Occasional Wife store on Magazine Street, selling organizational paraphernalia to D.I.Y. declutters. Soon, the business began to evolve from selling organizational supplies to offering professional help for the decluttering process, to help empower career women like herself.
Kay quickly realized that potential clients who most needed her help were often reluctant to utilize her services because they were suffering from shame, sadness, or a feeling of hopelessness. A keystone philosophy of the new service business became “efficiency, not judgment.” Kay and her team helped clients realize that seeking professional help was not a failure on their part, but a step toward regaining a sense of harmony.
Before and after home office organization
Before and after attic organization
To better serve her client needs, Kay eventually expanded OW to include five vintage shops (three in New Orleans, one in Mandeville and one in Perdido Key, Florida), a packing and moving company, a handy husband service, and weekly estate sales. Today, the Occasional Wife employs more than sixty people who work across the region as occasional wives, worker bees, occasional husbands, movers, packers, and retail managers.
Kay Morrison’s mom
Kay credits her mom with her success. “Mother was adorable,” she recalls. “A happy homemaker who made everything she did seem effortless – and oh, so nice.”
“Oh, so nice,” is an apt description for the French Quarter location of Occasional Wife, which opened at 624 Dumaine Street just last year. It’s surrounded by neighborhoods where most dwellings were built in the early 1800s, a time when home storage mainly consisted of an armoire to hold a few changes of clothing.
Lately, Kay and her team have been consulting and scheduling more organizational makeovers for those moving into historic neighborhoods from more contemporary houses. They’ve also been discovered by those who’ve lived in the same historic home for years, but their clutter and collections have accumulated and become overwhelming.
Despite being the Diva of Organization, Kay admits that “I am totally not perfect. But I follow a few guidelines to keep the clutter in my own life under control.”
Kay’s Favorite Tips:
For everything that comes into the house, something has to leave
Make peace with your junk drawer
Disciplining yourself to jettison an item for every item that comes into your home is key for everyone, Kay says - but for historic home dwellers, it’s an imperative.
Kay recommends that every household have one junk drawer and one donation bin (to be clear, that is only one of each). Kay keeps her own donation bin by the back door, where she and her family deposit items that no longer fit or are no longer needed. When it’s filled, everything is taken to a charity shop like Out of the Closet on Magazine Street.
Then once a month Kay combines her guilty pleasure of binge-watching an hour of reality TV with sorting out her junk drawer.
In the French Quarter Occasional Wife store
Vanessa Niemann
Vanessa Niemann is The Occasional Wife’s adroit Project Manager. She conducts a free assessment for each potential client, crafting the plan to help them manage their stuff. In essence, she is a matchmaker.
Once she presents the client with the cost of the makeover, Vanessa assists them in arriving at a strategy for forward progression – within their budget and comfort level. Part of her genius is artfully pairing each client with the perfect Occasional Wife, and in many cases, a “Worker Bee” for additional support. Revamping historic homes with decluttering and organizing strategies is especially satisfying. “The charm of the past can shine through in a clutter-free space,” she says.
What, you may wonder, are Vanessa Niemann’s professional organizer credentials? Since 2004, Vanessa, has been dazzling audiences around the country as Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Review.
This award-winning performer and female band leader, known as the “punk rock Patsy Cline” organized her tours for more than twenty years. This included everything from booking the gigs to packing all her bands’ costumes, personal items, and equipment into a van that they had to live out of for three months on the road.
Vanessa as Gal Holiday and as organizational diva at Occasional Wife, photos courtesy Vanessa Niemann
The pandemic prompted a major pivot and Vanessa began to utilize her superpower – working as a professional organizer for The Occasional Wife, while performing porch concerts.
Vanessa believes that “any challenge is far easier to manage if it is broken down into small manageable steps. Decluttering begins by building up your confidence.”
Vanessa’s Favorite Tip : Take baby steps toward calming clutter.
Set a timer for 1 hour or listen to an hour-long podcast. In those sixty minutes organize just one closet shelf or kitchen cabinet.
“Even if you accomplish one task a week, by the end of the month you will see progress,” Vanessa promises.
Carly Levin
Carly Levin, Manager of The Occasional Wife’s French Quarter Consignment Shop (624 Dumaine, 70116) is another career woman who organically gravitated to joining Kay Morrison’s team.
As a teen, Carly divided her time between helping in her Tulane professor grandfather's antiquarian book shop on Hampson Street and her dad's shoe store in Metairie. In fact, Carly can trace shopkeeping all the way back to her great-grandparents, who ran a jewelry store in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the late 1800s.
Carly spent several years traversing between her career as an early childhood educator (K-6th grade) and working on Saturdays and school holidays at Kay’s first shop on Magazine Street. Nowadays, she artfully manages the ebb and flow of consignments and sales, something that comes as second nature to her.
Carly at the French Quarter location of the Occasional Wife, 634 Dumaine Street
Carly says that an initial purge and organization doesn’t solve the problem forever because decluttering/downsizing/purging is a constant process. While it’s important for everyone, it’s crucial for those who live in historic homes with limited storage areas. She also agrees with Kay and Vanessa that all it takes to ease into the well-organized groove is one hour, once a week and waxes poetic about the joy to be found in freeing up space.
This organizational maven says that the sweet spot of rightsizing is easy to maintain when it becomes a perpetual habit, rather than an avoidable chore. Carly promises that it becomes a consistent maintenance activity – like changing your bed, putting away your clean dishes, or changing out your seasonal decorations.
Carly’s Favorite Tip: Knowing when to let go.
“Go through the mental exercise of deciding if you want to put something away or give it away?” Carly suggests. "If I haven't touched something in a month," she says, "It's probably time to let it go.”
Those of us fortunate enough to live in New Orleans can turn this confrontation with clutter into a celebration – complete with a communal pot of gumbo, WWOZ blaring in the background, and an Occasional Wife or good friend to conduct the process.
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