Changing-Places

Changing Places is top notch! We recommended them to one of our high-​profile clients who needed someone to help coordinate and manage their move into an 8,000 square foot home. Changing Places did an excellent job transitioning them into their new home, from helping edit down their belongings to unpacking and organizing every detail in their new home. They stayed in touch throughout the process and were a pleasure to collaborate with. Their focus on client satisfaction and their high attention to detail resulted in a seamless transition for our clients. We can’t wait to work with them again!

My Saga with Changing Places
My wife’s company hired changing places to help us with our move to the Bay Area. They helped schedule repair people to fix things and get our house professionally cleaned before we moved in. They also helped organize some of our stuff before and after our move.
On the positive side, they try really hard, and they have a really good closet guy who, if you get him to work on your project, will do a great job in organizing your closet. However, there were a number of issues that prevent me from recommending Organizing Options in general.
First, and most importantly, they have a difficult time listening to what you ask for and actually doing it. Instead, they seem to have a mental script or vision of what they think you would like, and they do that instead. As someone who likes to be listened to, this was rather frustrating. As an example, one of their team came to our home before the move and helped us to figure out where the furniture would go in our new house. To minimize the trauma on our kids and also because we were preparing for an open house, I instructed her to not put any labels on the furniture but instead make a list of what will go where. When we were not watching, she put labels on nearly everything. I had to go around and pull them all off before the open house. She also took it upon herself to rearrange the furniture in several rooms to help «stage» the house. When I came home and found my fireplace grille hiding behind the couch, I had to put it (and all the other things) back where they belonged.
Second, they are not very handy in the handyman sense. For example, we asked to have them be at the house when the alarm system was enabled. There were all kinds of problems getting it to work, and in the end, they left one of the doors of the house unlocked and ajar and the alarm off for a week while our house was unoccupied. Thankfully, no one broke in, but a more handy person would have realized that the alarm error code was an open door and shut and locked it before leaving.
Third, I noticed on the first day of our move in that someone from the the team had thrown away some things I wanted to keep (e.g., my compost bin and some old sponges). I explained that I did not want them throwing away any of my stuff, but in the end, they threw away a number of things that we wanted to keep. They seemed to have some vision of what was important and what was not and would toss out anything they thought we would not need (like my fingernail clippers and parts to my shaver). The only reason I realized this is because of my next point.
I am a bit of a recycling fanatic, and I realized that the Changing Places people are not good at recycling at all. This is rather strange because I thought that Californians were really into recycling. Anyway, they generated an incredible amount of garbage in the process of organizing my wife’s closet. Even though I asked several times for them to leave the boxes of garbage for me to sort for recycling, they strongly insisted on carting off their trash. In the end, I was able to get them to leave two large wardrobe boxes stuffed full. When I went through the boxes, about 98% of it was recyclable or could be donated to Goodwill. I also found a bunch of things that I did not want to throw away (my best tweezers, hairdryer parts, instruction manuals, jewelry, a vase, and our daughter’s toothbrush and some of her knick knacks).
In summary, I think Changing Places would be a good choice for you if you had an elderly relative who needs some organizational help and would not miss a few of their items being thrown away.

These people are unbelievable! The most helpful and fun team to work with. Cannot thank them enough for all their hard work. Worth every dollar! NOT TO MENTION — I still call them (We moved 3 months ago) and say «Do you happen to remember where my … is?» AND THEY DO!!! They lead me right to it! Amazing!