By CAROL MARSH

"This is an emergency. I haven't seen my dining room table in months!" said the caller when Barbara Caldecoat answered her phone.

As owner of a Ravenna-Bryant area business called Organized Indeed, Caldecoat's work doesn't fall within the normal definition of emergency services, "but a lot of my clients come to me with emergencies," she said, resuming her seat in the sunlight on her back patio, after talking to the caller who was seeking her help.

She will find time in the coming week to help this woman sort the papers and miscellany which have piled up on the table - and no doubt on all the other flat surfaces in her home as well. Together, they will dispose of a lot of it, and find homes for the stuff worth keeping.

"First, I try to categorize everything," Caldecoat said, describing how she approaches her business of helping people get organized. "I put like things together. Working with the client, we throw away what they don't need. If it's something they've been hanging on to, but they haven't used it in years, they probably don't need it. But they must decide. I can help because I go in with an objective point of view - I'm not attached to any of their belongings."

The key to getting organized, explained Caldecoat, is to simplify by getting rid of excess. "Once you get rid of the excess, there's room for what's left," she said. "It's just knowing where to find what you need when you need it."

Caldecoat started her business, Organized Indeed, out of her home five years ago. She planned to take a few months off from her career in banking, but found that months stretched to years, and she didn't seem to be going back to the office.

"I thought about what I enjoyed doing," she said. "Friends asked me to help them organize their home offices, or their homes. I helped a neighbor organize her garage, then her home office and her basement, and then we organized for a Christmas party."

Caldecoat put classified ads in a few local papers, and her home business was off and running. She keeps busy. A lot of her clients are repeats.

While some of her work involves helping people organize their time, mostly she organizes things in physical space - small offices, desks, files, rooms, closets, even drawers - bringing order out of chaos. Sometimes, she does it herself. More often she works with the clients, showing them how it's done.

"Paperwork is a big part of it," she said. "We get inundated with so much stuff. People tend to hang onto it, thinking they should read it. I say, if you didn't ask for it, do you really need it?" Sorting through piles of papers, it's not unusual to find money!

Sometimes Caldecoat's client is a widow or widower, whose spouse handled everything. "Big money can be involved," she said, in documents the client didn't know existed. She helps sort through the material and get it ready to take to an accountant.

She has gone into rooms so full there was no place to walk, and offices where the computer was buried under piles of paper, "and I had to ask what the electrical cords were connected to."

A dead bird in a box is the oddest thing she recalls finding, and the client wouldn't part with it. "She had been a teacher, and thought she might be again, and the bird was for 'show and tell.'

"Nothing surprises me, anymore," she said. "I just pretend it's not odd, and deal with it."

"When people have all this stuff piled up, they feel like they can't get on with their lives," she said. "Most of my clients are intelligent, well-educated people. They just get to a point in their lives where they're overwhelmed. Getting organized fells like having a weight removed from their shoulders."

Barbara Caldecoat can be reached at 525-0564.