BONUS MINI-SODE | "Don't Mess With Eyeballs!" and A Heartwarming Message From Mom
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Melissa: Hey pro organizers. It's Melissa, and I am here to wrap up our awesome series with my friend Kim of Rustic Home Organizing. And we have learned a lot from her in the series, but I wanted to give you a bonus mini-sode because Kim had one story that was a cautionary or a safety tale that I think is important for organizers to hear.
And then she had a story that was just really pull at your heartstrings lovely and wonderful about, you know, kind of the serendipity of finding organizing as a career that I found inspirational. And I thought that you might too, so here is just a wonderful little extra to wrap up our series with my friend, Kim. Have a great day, organizers!
Melissa: This is extremely random, but I want you to talk to us about what happened to you in December—the terrible cleaning products situation. This is safety corner.
Kim: Okay. By the way, that video has gone viral too. It has over a million views. Oh my gosh.
Melissa: Okay. We'll link it. I'll link it in the show notes so you guys know.
Kim: It was so, oh geez, what a month. Okay. So first of all, I want every organizer, women, business owner, anybody out there listening to this right now that has an intuition. That they want to take a month off to just take the **** month off. So, you know, I worked my *** off all summer and I, I worked so many hours.
I loved it. I'm not complaining at all, but I knew that I wanted to spend the month of December, I wanted to take the month of December off. I had my daughter and her fiancé, we're gonna be flying in from Boston for 10 days. My granddaughter Charlie is now one and a half, so a little bit more fun.
Caitlin was coming home from U of O in, early in the beginning of the month. I'm just like, I'm just gonna be home. Like, I'm just gonna be a mom again, for a month. Well, you know, that was October, and then November turned to ****. But then, all of a sudden, November went gangbusters again at the last two weeks, like always.
But I also, I let people know when my past clients, I also let them know when my calendar frees up and usually I get somebody that wants it. And then all of a sudden I had two big declutter and downsizing jobs pop up that needed to happen in December. Okay, I'll do it. Whatever. I won't take December off.
Who needs December off?
November 30th, was doing a bathroom, I picked up a bottle, a spray bottle, and it had not been screwed on all the way, but I didn't know that, so I was lifting it from the top—and it stayed on long enough to, I was bending down, I picked it up so it dropped from the full length of me standing up, hit the ground, and whatever gravity, whatever happened, and it, like, fountained straight up, so the bottle hit. And it was full enough, empty enough, whatever it was, that it created this shooting of this cleaner directly into my eyeball.
Melissa: You had, like, the worst physics experiment example.
Kim: Literally, I don't think it could be duplicated. Yeah. And I was there alone and I freaked out, I panicked, I'm screaming, I go under the sink and I start flushing it, flushing it, flushing it and I mean, it was, the burning was unreal.
So this happened at 11:15. I powered through the job, wet washcloth, kept rinsing it, organizing with one hand over my eye. Luckily, it wasn't a product implementation day. It was just sorting and…
Melissa: I am going to stop and yell at you about this for just one second, though, I'm going to yell at you because there are a few things that I believe you do not mess around with eyes happen to be:
Eyeballs.
Do not mess with eyeballs, people. The second thing that you never want to mess with is your lungs. So anyone who's like, oh, this house has a mold problem. But I think I'm still gonna do it. Please do not. Okay, like I don't say no to most things, but like, do not mess with your eyes and do not mess with your lungs.
But continue.
Kim: Yes. I keep, I keep pressing on, but you know, I'm just like, I'm committed, you know, and I just, ah. So I make it through till 1:15 and. I leave and I have to go to a consultation.
Melissa: Oh my gosh.
Kim: And my consultation is 30 minutes away. So, I am trying to drive, back roads, a deer runs in front of my car, didn't hit it, thank goodness, I'm still eye watering, so much pain, I mean it's been two hours now, right?
I swing into a CVS, grab a bunch of Visine, I'm squirting Visine in my eye.
Melissa: I feel like that's the worst thing you could do, I am not an ophthalmologist, but that feels even worse.
Kim: I'll tell you about that. And then I get to my consultation. And, my eye’s are almost swollen shut at this point, and I'm just like, “Hey, I just kind of scratched my eye a little bit today, so let's just see what you've got going on.”
Holding my eye, power through, a 30 minute consultation.
By the time I finished the consultation, I was almost ready to throw up, I was in so much pain. I have a 30 minute drive home. I get back in the car, this, this is everything, if I ever found out my kid did any of this, I'd be so mad.
Melissa: Are you, just, as you're telling this story, like, are you going, oh, I'm making very bad decisions here.
Kim: Oh, when I think about what I did, I just, I'm so ridiculous. It's a cautionary tale, you guys, anybody listening, cautionary tale. You cannot go on autopilot when you do something like that.
So I get home finally at 3:30, so this happened at 11:15, I'm home at 3:30. Nobody's home. Chad is out of range. I can't call him. My family knows I've done something because I sent a picture of my eye and I, at 4:15 text, no I didn't text I called. I voice called because I couldn't even see my phone. I called my daughter, my oldest daughter who lives just five minutes away. And I said, I need urgent care or I need an emergency room.
So she came and got me. We go to the emergency room. They are an eight hour wait. So we leave the emergency room, find an urgent care. They get me. And by the time I'm at urgent care, there is green goo coming out of my eye.
Melissa: I need to put a content warning on this podcast.
Kim: I know. Sorry. But I will tell you the AFC is what they're called.
They were the most amazing urgent care and took care of me. They flushed it. You should have heard the jokes between my daughter not shutting her mouth behind me and me leaning over being flushed and the stuff that the nurses and the doctors were saying they were so good to me. They checked my eye.
There was no scratches and it ended up being okay, but it was quite the experience.
Melissa: And it is, all joking aside, like, when you told me about this happening, I was thinking about all of the things that we touch in garages and basements and all of that kind of stuff, like, this could happen very, very easily.
Kim: Obviously, very easily. And yeah, definitely hindsight, I would have handled it slightly different because there was an urgent care, I think, right there next to my client's house, but I just, yeah. I didn't know, and I just kept moving. Yep.
Melissa: It all worked out, but be careful. And I would tell you this, if you watch it on YouTube, you can see Kim's eyes are fine. She is fine.
Kim: Yes, they are fine, no pirate eye patch.
But, Melissa, the one thing I did say at the beginning of this, when you asked me, is when somebody gets an intuition to take a month off, they really should. So, even though my eyeball was better two days later I came down with some horrific virus. That happened on November 30th, December 2nd, I woke up knowing something wasn't right and was so incredibly ill for three and a half weeks.
December 22nd was the first day I felt like I could be a human being again had spent another day in urgent care there.
So listen to your gut. My body obviously did not want to work the month of December and all those clients that I had scheduled, I had to reschedule and that is not something you want to do either.
Melissa: But let me ask you a question though. Were the clients that you had to reschedule, were they nice about it or were they jerks or?
Kim: Everybody was amazing. Everybody. I had one client that was brand new. I hadn't worked with before and I had a lot of concern that this was, Oh, this looks bad. This looks flaky because this is not like me.
But then I just decided if that's the impression that she gets, then that's okay. Let it go.
Melissa: but I love that because I and I did not know what the your answer was going to be because you're you could have come back and been like, yep, they all canceled on me. But like, that is an example of we sometimes and I mean, all joking aside when you kept working on your job, you know, because you're like, that's what I do.
I work like you could have told that client. Hey, I just had like caustic chemicals splash and I can't finish your job. I have worked in this business a long time, I have not had anyone where I've had a legitimate situation where I haven't said, I am so sorry, but everyone's been nice.
Life happens, and I think that people, and now there are a lot of bad things that came out of COVID, I think one of the good things is people seem to be a little bit more respectful when sickness happens, we're just like, nope, we understand, go take care of yourself.
Kim: Yeah, and that's why it's important I think to be consistent as a business owner and how you present yourself too, because I do present myself, I'm always on time I'm, I always communicate, I very rarely cancel a session, so you need to be consistent so that when something does happen, it truly is, out of the ordinary and people will have a little bit more compassion for you .
Melissa: Yeah, that's not a great story, but on the flip side, can you tell us the story about your mom.
Kim: This was so cool. So this is just such an amazing, I could see I just got goosebumps. I love it.
So, my helper that helps me on some of my jobs happens to be my niece as well. She is in her thirties, and is my sister's daughter. We were working on a job in Portland and she came one day and said, I have some stuff in my car that my mom sent with me and I was like, that's weird.
Well, my sister had spent some time with my stepdad and his house and still had some of my mom's things. I did not know that. So anyway, we finished our session and we go to the car and she hands me this organizational like basket thing.
And inside of it were two books. One was, and these were dated in 1997, I think, 1996. One was, "How to Become a Professional Organizer” and one was, “How to Organize Your Life.”
And when I saw those books, I knew for sure that I had chosen the right path. I had never spoken to my mom about organizing. Not one time. I had no idea that she was even interested in this and interested in it before it was even a thing is what is even crazier.
So, you know, I lost my mom at 68 to breast cancer in 2015, so to find this out eight years later was such an incredible gift. And I have those books right by my desk, and it's just a reminder of those gut intuition feelings, those callings that you have.
You know, I had this calling in 2001 when I wanted to start an organizing business and didn't do it. I'm glad I started when I did because I have so many life experiences to help me become a better organizer, to be able to relate to people. But just knowing that that my mom wanted to be one too is so awesome.
Melissa: And I just think these are the gifts of there is just serendipity, I think sometimes where you just go like, I can't explain it. And, you know, people will call it different things, but I, I just think it's really, really sweet to know that's like that confirmation that you're on the right path.
Kim: yes, it was.
And it was in October because I was, I, every month I try and turn my posts pink for breast cancer awareness. And I remember doing an Instagram story with my pink shirt on. So it was kind of, finding all of that out in the month of October was really cool.
Melissa: Thank you so much for listening to the Pro Organizer Studio Podcast. I am Melissa, and I am happy to be your guide in your organizing business, whether you were starting out brand new or whether you are an experienced organizer that is looking to grow, I would love to help you. Please reach out to me at hello@proorganizerstudio.com. I would love to have a chat with you about how we can work together. Have an absolutely stunningly wonderful week organizers.
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