When is it time to call in a professional organizer? When your marriage is at risk

I feel like I’ve been repeatedly slapped in the head by a Dillard’s “private label” suit coat from 1997. This odd emotional journey is due to a variety of events. But it’s tethered in discovering that one of my long-held beliefs has been irrevocably proven to be false.

For years I had embraced the conviction that hiring a professional closet organizer was only for lazy people. I now know that I was 100% incorrect.

This epiphany came about after I spent an entire Saturday helping my husband go through all his items in our shared closet. The onerous event was due to the fact that we had to take everything out of our closet since we were getting new carpet and paint.

I designated myself as the closet empty-outer. This meant that I used a guest room to store all of my husband’s clothes. My master plan was to put a 9-by-12-inch blanket on the floor, lay out all his clothes from the closet and then cover the clothes up with another blanket to guard against dust and pets.

What ensued was that I created a mountain of clothes (which our cat immediately claimed as his favorite sleeping spot, of course) that stood as a testament to the fact that my husband hadn’t purged a suit or dress shirt for at least two decades.

I’d like to state for the record that I don’t know how this happened. We’ve barely lived in this house for one decade, so how can there be suits in the closet from the ’90s? But alas, this was the situation facing us and it demanded a rigorous closet cleanse.

One of the largest obstacles (besides the clothes mountain) was that my husband had zero enthusiasm for sorting through his clothes. But after seeing the pile of suits even he had to admit that it was a task that couldn’t be avoided. So, together we went hand-in-hand to climb this summit together.

At first, I was a perky cheerleader dispensing positive affirmations that he was doing a great job taking 10 minutes to decide if an ugly dress shirt should go in the keep or donate pile. But it didn’t take long before I needed to take Diet Coke breaks to settle my nerves.

But not even that carbonated splendor could help me when I was emotionally broken by a suit that was bought at a Dillard’s in Waco, Texas in 1997. First of all, this suit was heinously out of style. The shoulder pads in the suit coat were large enough to land the International Space Station on and the pant cuffs were wide enough that you could use them as auxiliary pant pockets to hold your wallet. Then there was the fact that my husband could no longer fit into the suit. (No shame there because it was bought 26 years ago.)

Yet for some unfathomable reason, he couldn’t let go of the suit. This was when I lost my mind and threatened to divorce him if he didn’t speed up the process and put the suit in the donate pile. My husband then admitted that at this point he didn’t think the whole divorce thing sounded like such a bad idea and would be significantly less painful then going through all his clothes.

Finally, after many arduous hours we completed the “cleanse” with our marriage intact. But I can honestly say that I will never do this again without a third-party mediator — and by that, I mean a professional closet organizer.

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com..