Clutter Buster Brings Order to Basement Chaos
by Bob Allen
Amy Rehkemper, owner of Simplify Organizing Services of Towson (left) consults with Timonium homeowner and mother Jenny Howard, who is holding her six-week-old son, Jamie. Howard’s basement makeover will be featured on HGTV’s “Mission: Organization” premiering 9:30pm on Sept. 6th on HGTV.
Timonium resident Jenny Howard may not be famous, but her basement soon will be. Not too many people will recognize the new, re-imagined and reinvented living space, which just a few months ago, according to Howard, looked “like a pigsty.”
The basement playroom, once a helter-skelter, chockablock repository for toys and just about anything else that wouldn’t fit elsewhere in the house, has had a dramatic facelift and a comprehensive nip- and-tuck, a real Hollywood-style makeover. Well, at least a Home & Garden Television network-style makeover.
The once chaotic basement’s dramatic transformation was performed courtesy of Amy Rehkemper, founder and owner of Simplify Organizing Services, a Towson-based space reorganizing and room rescue consultancy.
Rehkemper did the makeover for an HGTV home-improvement show called “Mission: Organization.” The program on Howard’s basement that was filmed in February will air for the first of several times at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 6. HGTV is carried on channel 46 on Comcast Cable in Baltimore County.
A production crew from “Mission: Organization” made five lengthy visits to Howard’s house during crucial stages in the makeover, which took about a month to complete.
“We could barely walk through the room before,” said Howard, a former pediatric nurse at Kennedy Krieger Institute who is now a stay-at-home mom with three small boys. “It was basically a dumping ground where we put everything that we didn’t have any place else to put.
“But when Amy was finished, everything was organized,” added Howard, who has been a client of Rehkemper’s in the past. “She has a real eye for this. She can see a whole room like this one was before, and she can see how to improve it. Whereas I’m just … dumbfounded.”
Organizer Amy Rehkemper and homeowner J.B. Howard pose for the HGTV camera.
Rehkemper, who did a master bedroom makeover for a 2003 episode of “Mission: Organization,” said it’s all in a day’s work for her. Where a less organized person might experience bewilderment or even utter demoralization in the face of such wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor chaos, Rehkemper merely smiles, rolls up her sleeves and plunges in.
She insists that the dishevelment in Howard’s basement was child’s play compared to some room makeovers she’s taken on.
“I’ve actually had clients who moved out of their messy homes to new homes, and they filled the new ones up too,” she said cheerfully. “That’s when they call me.”
Nearly every last one of them has used the world ‘overwhelmed,'” added Rehkemper, who is a founder, past president and current board member of a trade organization called Maryland Association of Professional Organizers. “People get to the point where they’re stuck in clutter, and they can’t get out of it.”
Even though it was Rehkemper who approached Howard about being a potential guinea pig when the TV show asked her to do an episode for the 2005 season, Howard agrees that “overwhelmed” was an apt description of her plight. With Jack, her 6-year-old, Jeffrey, 1-and-a-half and 6-week-old Jamie on her hands, she had neither the time, nor energy to confront the basement clutter.
“Amy redesigned it so everything has a place, whereas before my husband, J.B., and I didn’t even know where to start,” she said. “It would have taken us years to do what she did in a month, and it’s so much more peaceful being in an organized environment.”
Howard said it’s a testimonial to Rehkemper’s organizational savvy that even Howard’s 6-year-old son has learned a thing or two from her. “He’ll say things like ‘Amy would not want us to do that,'” she said. “And I’ve even been able to get him to put away toys … at least a little bit more often than he used to.”