You have been thinking about hiring someone for months. Maybe longer. You open a few local websites, you get to the part where the price should be, and instead you read contact us for a quote. So you close the tab.
You read that the way anyone would. A price behind a form feels like a price you are not meant to see cold. And so the number in your head grows, and the bigger it gets, the less likely you are to ever pick up the phone.
So here is the number, up front. Then I will tell you what it buys, hour by hour, in a real house.
Why I put my rate on the page
When I started Organize It I went looking for what this work costs in the Okanagan. I wanted to know where I sat before I set my own rate. It took me longer than it should have to find plain dollar figures, and that stuck with me, because I remembered doing exactly what you are doing now. Circling, guessing, and talking myself out of it.
So I decided to do it differently. My rate is written out on my pricing page in plain numbers, and it is in this post too. Not a range you have to book a call to unlock. The actual figure.
The reason is simple. The imagined price is almost always bigger than the real one, and that imagined price is the single thing keeping most people from making the call. Take it off the table and the decision gets a lot smaller.
The number, and what the three hour minimum means
I charge 55 dollars an hour. There is a three hour minimum on any booking, so a session starts at 165 dollars. The walk-through before that, where I come to your home and we talk about what is not working, is free and there is nothing attached to it.
The three hour minimum is not a sales tactic. It is the shortest block of time that produces a result you can actually see. One hour would go entirely to looking at the problem, and I would be packing up before anything changed. Three hours is enough to finish a closet, a pantry, or a home office and have it hold. It is the smallest real unit of work.
When a project is bigger than one space, the ranges on the pricing page give you a starting picture, and I confirm the scope at the free consultation before anything is booked. You will not get a surprise invoice. You know the rate, you know the minimum, and for a larger job you know the estimate before I start.
Now the part that actually matters. What does 165 dollars look like when it is happening in your kitchen.
The first hour is mostly decisions, not motion
Here is the honest bit most posts skip. The first hour does not look like much from the doorway. If you filmed it, you would see two people standing in a room, picking things up and putting them down, and talking. Not a lot of visible progress. This is normal, and it is the most important hour of the three.
We start by pulling one category out where you can see all of it at once. Every mug. Every bath towel. Every cable in the drawer. Seeing the whole of something is what makes decisions possible, because right now those mugs are spread across three cupboards and you have no idea you own fourteen of them.
Then you decide. I do not decide for you. I ask questions, I keep the pace moving, and I will tell you when I think you already know the answer. But the mug stays or goes because you say so. That back and forth is slow at first because you have not made these calls in years and the muscle is stiff. By the end of hour one it speeds up. It always does.
The reason this hour feels heavy is not the mugs. It is that a lot of what we pick up has something attached to it. A person, a plan you had, a version of your life. The emotional weight is the real obstacle in most homes, not the physical mess. The mess is easy. The deciding is the work.
The second hour is when the room starts moving
By the second hour the decisions come quicker and you can feel it. The keep pile has shape now. The go pile is real. You are not agonizing over every single item, because you set the pattern in hour one, and once the pattern is set your own instincts take over.
This is where I do the sorting you would dread doing alone. Everything staying gets grouped by how you actually use it, not by how it happened to land. In a kitchen that means the baking things live together near the counter you bake on. In a closet it means the clothes you wear every week sit at eye level and the once a year things move up and out of the way.
The go pile splits here too. Some of it is donation, which I sort and get to a place that actually wants it. Some of it is garbage or recycling, and where a job produces real volume I arrange the removal so it is one pickup rather than your problem. And some of it has resale value, which gets flagged and set aside for the next step.
By the end of the second hour the room looks different from the hallway. Not finished, but you can see where it is going. This is usually the point where a client stops apologizing for the state of things and starts getting a little excited.
The third hour is the system and the finish
The third hour is where it becomes a space that stays fixed instead of a space that got tidied. Tidying does not hold. You know this, because you have tidied that same drawer four times this year. A system holds because everything has one obvious home and putting it back is easier than not.
So everything staying goes into its place. If containers or baskets would help, I use what you already own first, and only suggest buying something if it genuinely earns its spot. I label things, because a label is what keeps the system alive after I leave and after the rest of the household gets involved. A drawer nobody can see into goes back to chaos in a month. A labelled one does not.
We also make a plan for the resale pile if there is one. Through the resale service I price and photograph your items and list them, usually on Facebook Marketplace, and I handle the messages so you are not fielding lowballers. Your things never leave your house. They sell from your space, the buyer arranges pickup with you, and you take the payment directly. You keep 60 percent of every sale.
At the end of three hours you have one space, done properly, for 165 dollars. Closets and offices and pantries finish inside that window. A full kitchen or a two car garage is usually a half day, so more like two sessions. You can read exactly how a room-by-room job runs on the home organizing page.
Where resale changes the math
This is the piece that makes the number look different than it first sounds. A lot of what you clear out still has value, and instead of driving it to the curb, we can sell it. That money comes back to you and offsets what the session cost.
I have had garages where the old tools and the bike nobody rides and the furniture in the corner brought back more than the organizing itself cost. That does not happen every time. Some homes are full of things that are lovely to you and worth nothing to a stranger, and when that is the case I will tell you plainly rather than list things that will never sell. But when there is a market, the cost of the work and the money coming back can meet in the middle.
The split is 60 percent to you and 40 percent to me, agreed before anything lists and settled at the end of the project by e-transfer or cash. There are no hauling fees or storage fees in that, because I do not haul or store anything. I am not a warehouse. I am one person who comes to your house and does the work with you. You can read more about how I work on my about page.
The same holds for the bigger projects, whether that is right-sizing support for a move to a smaller place or a full estate clear-out. The rate stays 55 dollars an hour. The resale can offset a real chunk of it. And the scope gets quoted at the free walk-through so you are never guessing.
What to do this week
If you have been circling this for months, the thing holding you back is almost certainly the imagined price, not the real one. It starts at 165 dollars for three hours, the walk-through is free, and a good part of that can come back to you through resale.
This week, pick the one space that bothers you most every time you walk past it. Not the whole house. One room, one closet, one garage. That is the size of a first session, and it is the size of thing that shows you what the rest of the house could feel like.
Then text me at 250-718-4227 to set up a free consultation. No commitment. We walk the space, I give you a straight number, and you decide from there. I got you.