‘R’ is a retired bank manager and is shortly moving to assisted living. An 84-year-old widower, his longtime home is a spacious Haifa apartment, each of its six rooms crammed with cherished possessions — books, pictures, photos, furniture, clothes, linens, appliances, dishes, memories of his late wife, his three grown children and his many grandchildren.
“It was his daughter who called us in,” says home organizer Inbal Shacham-Glick, 49, founder and CEO of Ba Li Seder. “She told me: ‘My dad can’t decide what to get rid of. He won’t let us decide for him, and we don’t know what to do!’”
Shacham-Glick began, as she always does, by going to meet her client to learn what he wanted. “I reassured him that our aim was for him to feel as at home in his new apartment as he does now — but that its three small rooms would require adjustments,” she says. “Soon, he trusted me to the point of giving me his credit card, saying, ‘My furniture is too big to take with. Go get me something that will fit.”
Together with his daughter, they went together to choose suitable furniture, that emphasized not only comfort and aesthetics but also smart storage. After having it installed and arranged in her client’s new home, Ba Li Seder helped him pack everything he needed to take with him — “which, of course, included memory-saturated treasures,” says Shacham-Glick. They hired movers, unpacked the boxes in the new apartment and put everything in place — coordinating with electricians over light fittings and plumbers over the washing machine. The former bank manager entered his new home to find not only that everything was where it should be, but, more importantly, it was all comfortably and conveniently adapted to his needs.
As for everything left behind, Shacham-Glick brought large boxes and labels to the old apartment, instructed her client’s three children to pack and label anything they wanted to keep, had it delivered to them and disposed of the rest. “That way, the client didn’t see his possessions competed over or spurned,” she says.
A former hi-tech marketing and project manager, with ‘neat genes’ inherited from both grandmothers, Shacham-Glick operates countrywide (and, once a month, pro bono), developing a specialty in third-agers.
“Over a lifetime, we accumulate too many possessions, turning our homes into warehouses,” she says. Ruefully, she admits that, were it hers, she would dispose of three quarters of the contents of her parents’ long-term home, “but I realize that what is trash to me is, to them, is a lifetime of precious memories.”
Along with that, she says, our needs change — from a young couple’s pristine first home, to energetically childproofing it, to shunning low chairs and high cupboards when knees and backs begin aching.
There are many solutions for third-agers, and she ensures that Ba Li Seder is on top of them all. “When a client wants to renovate — modernize a kitchen, turn step-in bath into walk-in shower, convert a spare room for a carer — we manage the work and restore everything to client satisfaction,” she says. “If they’re relocating to somewhere more manageable or to assisted living, we oversee the move and advise on maximizing space and storage — replacing, as with our Haifa client, large and heavy furniture, or adding a sofa bed in the lounge in place of the lost guestroom.”
While much may have to be left behind, proper planning allows a lot to be kept. “When I sort personal belongings, I start with the easiest: clothes unworn in over a year,” says Shacham-Glick. “Loose photos can be bundled together or scanned. Small objects can be gathered in decorative boxes according to themes or periods. Compact furniture brings in use a room’s corners, and turns a piece of furniture into additional storage. Coffee tables, side tables and dressers can have accessible drawers and shelves.”
The practical solutions, however, only partly explain Ba Li Seder’s success with third-agers. Overriding everything, according to Shacham-Glick, is sensitivity to their clients and their needs.
“We work with people whose future may hold social, physical and mental limitations, who are losing their lifelong independence,” she says. “Our job is creating for them a place where they feel safe, happy and at home, surrounded by what’s important to them. From this perspective, renovating or moving can actually be an opportunity for renewal.”
Partnered with Ba Li Seder
