Fresh off a book tour, Martha-Carol Stewart shares her home organization methods

Life can get messy, but Martha-Carol Stewart shares all of her tips and tricks for finding calm within the chaos in her debut book, Southern Chaos: Organizing the Southern Home.

Stewart is the founder and CEO of Chaos Organizing, a professional home organizing company that provides services to the Baton Rouge area and beyond. Stewart wrote the book with Lisa Hutchinson Clement. It focuses on the company’s five-step Chaos Method—the exact method Stewart and her team use to organize homes.

“I am a firm believer that if your home is organized, that doesn’t mean it won’t be messy, but it does mean that getting it back to ground zero is a lot easier,” Stewart says. “It’s fewer decisions, so you don’t have as much decision fatigue, and there’s less anxiety and a better quality of life in your home.”

The organizing method developed by Stewart aims to make more space for life’s best moments, rather than focusing on never-ending housework and frantic searches for missing items. The book is specifically designed for Southerners who savor a slow lifestyle, and it’s now in stock at national chain The Container Store.

“I met the CEO of The Container Store at the How To Summit in Dallas, an organizing convention,” Stewart says. “I handed the book to him, and he was impressed. He asked if it was sold in the stores. I told him ‘no,’ so he said he would be in touch.”

Stewart received an email from the CEO the next day. The two decided on a book tour around Texas, with signings at the Houston, Woodlands and Austin locations, to promote the book.

“I sold and signed a ton of books, met fabulous folks, visited with my son and his friends and got quality time with my sister,” Stewart says of the December book tour. “I received an email from the stores as well as the CEO after the tour praising us on our success and thanking us for bringing fun to their stores. It was certainly not a one-and-done.”

After leaving her thirteen-year teaching career to start her own organizing business, Stewart felt that the time she had previously spent in the classroom could be better utilized by serving families instead. She is a strong believer that kids can have more success in the classroom if they have more success at home.

“Our homes need to be our place where we can rest and recharge from the day,” Stewart says.

Stewart says she was always considered a messy child. It took her until college to realize that her space and routine were not only affecting her anxiety, but also her grades. Whether it was putting away her clothes or doing the dishes before bed, Stewart began to slowly pick up after herself to form new habits.

“I realized in college that the structure that I was taught growing up made a difference in the success of my life,” Stewart says.

Chaos Organizing offers three services: home organization, downsizing and unpacking for a home or corporate space. Each package includes a consultation, various hours of labor and a copy of Stewart’s book, Southern Chaos: Organizing the Southern Home. The book includes a breakdown of Stewart and her team’s process when organizing a home.

“It’s basically training people exactly what we do in the home,” Stewart says. “We categorize, we take items and ask if it’s helpful or hurtful to our goal. Then, we decide to keep, toss or donate. Then we organize them in bins, and last, we label things.”

This system is the same as how Stewart trains her employees. The Chaos Organizing team consists of people who have had a life full of experiences. Stewart says it’s important that when her team arrives at a client’s house, they are able to relate to what a person is going through.

“My lead organizers are seasoned and experienced in life, and I look for that when I hire, because I want them to know the tricks that we’ve learned from experience,” Stewart says.

The company also offers a “Space Lift” special. After the original organization visit, the team will come back for a two-and-a-half hour visit to straighten up or adjust anything that may not be working with your routine—a way for Chaos Organizing to visit the home again and make sure that everything feels perfect.

“We look at organizing kind of like people look at a puzzle,” Stewart says. “We get excited about it and excited about solving the problem.”