May 31, 2017 5 min read

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Have you ever placed something in a bag to donate only to pull it out again the next day and decide to keep it? Or felt frustrated with a cluttered room where you want to part with things you no longer use but can’t because of an emotional attachment?

Perhaps a second opinion helps. Aimee Costello, 37, of Canonsburg, transitioned from a full-time nurse practitioner with Children’s Hospital in the Pediatric Oncology Department to professional organizer two years ago. A bit burned out in her career, she turned “casual” and pursued her passion of helping others while using her organizational skills. This month, she takes the exam to become a certified professional organizer, after accruing the 1,500 hours required to sit for the test.

She calls her business Grace2Bfree because she believes people experience freedom when they are not owned by their belongings.

Each career has its overlaps. “Both of my jobs require a level of intimacy,” Costello offers. Her organizing clients share the stories of their lives – their hopes and their memories when they handle an item they may give away. Likewise, as a nurse, she becomes very close with the patients and their families, listening to their life stories and sharing her own.

Ironically, she has come full circle with a family she worked with at the start of her nursing career, the Conover family of Mt. Lebanon. Fifteen years ago, Costello was assigned to care for their 12-year-old-son Matthew, who passed away after a nine-month battle with cancer. She became close with the family as they suffered through the loss of their second-born child. Ten years later, Noelle Conover, Matthew’s mother, accepted a position at Children’s Hospital working with the survivors of childhood cancer and the two became co-workers. This past year, Costello had the privilege of working side-by-side with Conover as she began the process of downsizing her home, now that her three surviving children are grown. The two have gone through her attic most recently and are working on the basement.

“Matt’s items are hardest for me to part with. Aimee helps you with the emotional stuff, she’s so patient. When you are going through that, you need another person there. You can’t do it on your own,” Conover says.

Costello found her gift of organization when she dealt with her own emotional turmoil following the breakup of her marriage in 2014. “I moved home, cut back to part time and starting purging my storage unit and then my mom’s house. It was really freeing,” she says. “Then I went into the office one day and said, ‘I’m going to be a professional organizer. I had no idea that was an actual career until a co-worker introduced me to a real professional organizer whom I shadowed,” she says.

She’s worked with a variety of age groups doing all sorts of jobs, from helping paint rooms to sorting through family recipes and photos and cleaning out attics and closets.

“I put people in broad categories. I’ve found baby boomers tend to be relatively organized, but have a lot stuff in a house they have lived in for many years. They may have a difficult time making decisions. The younger crowd is more about day-to-day living and may have small children so they need help finishing tasks,” Costello says.

Whatever the age, she’s found there is a niche for this type of assistance. “My business took off like wildfire. People either said ‘can I work for you?’ or ‘can you help me?'”

“I told Aimee it literally gave me the grace to be free to come home and have that project completed,” says Kelly Kirby of Cecil Township, who found Costello’s information on Facebook. She and husband Mike did some renovations and then painted, but couldn’t finish the entire project with their work schedules and responsibilities with her children.

Loretta O’Brien of Lawrenceville remembers exactly why she contacted Costello: “I was lying in bed at night thinking of how I never get to the bottom of my closet. I’d pull things out and look at them and say to myself ‘should I keep this, or get rid of it?’ We did the closet and the dresser then she suggested we go downstairs to the cupboards. She helped me go through photographs – I have grown five kids. At first it’s hard, I thought ‘I don’t want people to see all my stuff,’ but it was so easy because she’s not judgmental and we got along so well. We ended up going through the whole house except the basement.”

Usually Costello organizes by piles – the throw away, give away and keep piles — and she’s typically pretty accurate. She’ll work alongside a client or on her own whatever is comfortable for the client.

“And I like to re-purpose. I try to get good items to a new home, especially if a client is having a hard time parting with something. I recently connected a family with a keyboard that was no longer in use by another family. I had a young couple I was working with weights but no bench and another family with two extra weight benches and they were willing to give one way,” she says. “Sometimes, I feel like Santa Claus.” n