Lauren Klayton once found two toes in the same week while at work.

Yes, human toes. And no, she doesn’t work crime scenes.

The appendages, which she calls “sentimental toes,” are part of the gig when you’re a professional organizer. You never know what you might discover in a long forgotten box in a client’s basement.

For the record, the first toe, which she found in a jar, belonged to a podiatrist.

“I was like, hey, do you have any other body parts in jars I can put this with?” said Klayton, founder and co-owner of Clarity For Your Chaos. “Part of me was like I kind of want you to say yes because it’d be cool and part of me is like worried about the answer. It was the first toe he’d ever excised off a patient, so it was a sentimental toe.”

And the second toe fell out of a baby book into her hand.

“The first toe desensitized me. I was like, cool, I just need to know if it’s a dresser or closet toe,” said Klayton, meaning how should she store the toe. “No judgment, only solutions.”

The chances of finding a body part during today’s job are slim. It’s her first day working with Katie Liberatore, founder of the Colorado Springs nonprofit A Mom’s Guide to Survive, which provides free of charge anything a mom might need, including baby clothes, nursery items, postpartum supplies, pots, pans and other small items.

Liberatore runs the nonprofit out of her downtown apartment, where, up until today, she lived with two back rooms filled with precarious piles that expanded exponentially every time she said yes to a donation. The entropy weighed on her.

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“I keep the doors closed, otherwise I have a panic attack,” she said.

But on this sunny summer morning, Klayton has already been on the case for a few hours, working to first clear out one of the rooms before beginning the organization process. After pulling all the items out into the hallway, she’s stacked open industrial bins along one wall, each one designated for different types of items Liberatore receives. The goal is to make it easier for moms to come in and go shopping for the items they need.

“We come in and create the structure so we can get you back on track,” Klayton said. “And you can put that mental load down that you’re maybe revisiting over and over again.”

No panic attacks are brewing this morning, as Liberatore sits on the bedroom floor, calmly folding baby clothes. She’s already learned a valuable lesson: “Not to take any more donations until we get this organized,” she says.

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Klayton adds another one: “Boundaries.”

The partnership also benefits Liberatore, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as Klayton specializes in helping what she calls “neurospicy brains,” meaning those with multiple forms of neurodivergence, such as ADHD and autism.

She knows of what she speaks. After being diagnosed with ADHD in third grade, Klayton learned to manage her dyslexia, dyscalculia and different sensory processing disorders, and works to educate her clients who might share the same struggles and teach them tricks to better manage their lives. It also means she can recognize an ADHD house.

“This is an ADHD house — disorganized,” Liberatore says.

Klayton agrees that’s one part.

“People have a lot of items they don’t need anymore but might be really good or new bought, especially if they have ADHD or autism, where you tend to have issues with executive function processing, which would be organization, time planning, things like that.”

Her ADHD clients often have assorted piles due to object permanence — trouble visualizing an object when it’s not directly in front of them.

“You forget when you put things away in a bin,” Klayton said. “With ADHD I use a lot of clear containers so you can visually see the things. I see cabinets and drawers open. There’s usually cups everywhere. Three drinks at a time,” she said. “I’ll notice work spaces that are moveable because we don’t do well at sitting.”

She also can intuit when a client with ADHD has had enough for the day.

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“I try to work with all kinds of brains,” Klayton said. “If you have autism and you hear the lights, let’s change out the lightbulbs. Are you overstimulated? Is your space overstimulating? Do you need to be stimulated? I work from a swing. I know that sounds crazy, but I sit and work from a swing because I work better in movement.”

Klayton started her business in 2019 after four friends over the course of one week each separately told her she should be a professional organizer. At first she found it an odd idea; people would actually pay her to organize their stuff? But by week’s end she decided to give it a go. She got online and began giving tips on how to create spaces that better serve a person, and from there she expanded and grew her client list into the hundreds.

In addition to home and digital organization, Klayton and her staff provide space planning and design, life transitions support, household cleaning and general handyman work. She also created a separate initiative, Robinhood Revolution, to make sure whatever useable items her clients no longer want go to local nonprofits that can redistribute them to those in need.

“Our biggest tag phrase is who could you bless with your mess?” she said. “At the end of the day we all have messes. It might be a digital mess, emotional mess, physical mess. Everybody’s got a mess, so let’s help each other in the ways that we can because nobody has it 100% together. We’re just working toward better every day.”