How much does a professional home organizer cost?
How much does a professional home organizer cost?
I hate it when I just want a price on something and I get “you need to contact us”, so this is my compromise. If you want a specific price for your unique situation and what we will customize for you, call us. But I hope the following is a good reference point and helps you in your journey to getting organized.
The answer is that it varies based on the business providing the service, the person hiring the service, geographic location, and many other factors. However, I’ll do my best to give a shorthand version that’s also informative.
Our Process:
Pull
We pull every single thing from the space we’re organizing. This includes countertops, drawers, cupboards, on shelves, hanging on racks, and sitting on the floor.
Categorize
We take every one of those things and we place them into categories so when we load them back in, everything that should be together is together.
Purge
Many of our clients are fearful that we’re going to “make” them throw things away. That’s not our goal. We want to make the client feel good about the decisions they’ve made. The reality is, when your lack of space gives you anxiety and you see that you have 7 blowdryers, it’s easier to throw away or donate your 7th favorite one. If you do this across all categories, it adds up.
Space planning
This is where experience and skill start to come in. We take each category and estimate in our minds how much cabinet, drawer, etc space each category needs. This is also when we make decisions on which products to use in order to keep the system functional and sustainable.
Loading and Labeling
There is some overlap with space planning here. We can make our best guess and go for the best possible solution, but sometimes the space or number of items kept just doesn’t allow it to work. We load everything in, switch hangers, put items in containers, etc. and label when necessary. Labeling is another area with price variance. We have functional labels, nice functional labels, and we have beautiful labels. The functional ones print out, we put them on, done. Think laundry room. The nice functional labels use nicer printing paper and have designs so the print setup takes longer. Think homogeneous spice jars. The beautiful ones use a complex printing process and a way more labor intensive application process. They are, essentially, custom made stickers. Imagine printing a calligraphy sticker. They look beautiful, but they take 10-20x longer. It can add up to a bunch of hours. This is most relevant in kitchen and pantry. If you want to make your laundry room look as beautiful as possible, we can do it. If you just want the reminder of where the soaps go, we can do that too!
Ok, one more thing before I answer the question. As I hope is clear now, there’s just not a fast way of touching hundreds or thousands of items 2-4 times. If there were, you probably would have done it yourself. Using product is NECESSARY to keep the system sustainable and once you have it, you’ll use it. It would take up more space to NOT use it. If you don’t use product, you’re just doing a deep tidying exercise. In the beginning, we used to let clients convince us that their budget wasn’t big enough for the product we knew was necessary. We ended up not feeling good about the longevity of our work and don’t do that anymore. We have varying levels of product quality that we can offer, but not using enough isn’t worth all of the hours.
Across all of our jobs that use product (aka not including packing, unpacking or interior design jobs), the product cost works out to be about 20% of the total amount billed. BTW, because we don’t want our clients to ever wonder if we’re suggesting the purchase of more product to increase our numbers and to prevent them from going ahead and purchasing things that won’t work optimally in their space, we don’t upcharge for any products we purchase for clients.
Here goes: We charge $80/hr/organizer. This is in line with most other high-level organizing companies in the Dallas area.
Pantries $2,000-$2,500
Closets $2,000-$3,000
Kitchens $1,500-$2,500
Garages $2,500-$3,500
Home Offices $800-$1,600
Bathrooms $1,000-$1,750
Laundry $750-$1,500
Non-Master Baths $500-$750
Bedrooms
This is a luxury service, people don’t NEED this, but it does make life easier and better. Given that, we don’t do much work in small spaces. The problem with that is that large spaces are much harder to define. A 100 sqft closet is a big closet, but so is 1,000 sqft. However, in most very large closets, there’s an open space in the middle so you can’t say it would cost 10x more than the 100 sqft space.