Virginia called me today, and she was crying, reveals professional organizer Vicki Norris in her commonsense handbook, Restoring Order to Your Home. Buried in junk, Norris’ client simply couldn’t cope. Maybe you’re not that desperate, Norris says, but maybe your relationships or family is suffering because of household disorganization. Alleviating that suffering, she claims, is not about having a picture-perfect home or buying plastic storage bins. Instead, she says, Ordering your life and your environment is about one thing: reclaiming your life. The foundation of Norris’ organizing plan is understanding and fashioning a customized approach: if you take the time to truly divine the cause and effect of your disorganization, the better able you are to find solutions you can live with to banish chaos forever.

Norris, like other organizational consultants, offers a room-by-room battle plan for home de-cluttering (one strategy being to zone a space), but bases her solutions on a person’s individual preferences, plus whether a room is a public, private or storage area. She identifies common causes and hot spots of clutter, offers family-oriented strategies for dealing with the messes that toddlers and teenagers can create, and warns about the financial and psychological drain of the offsite storage unit. Organizing, says the author, will not only liberate you from household chaos; it will give you a fresh start on life! Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

Organizational guru Peter Walsh, the star of TLC’s hit show, Clean Sweep, takes a hard line on clutter in It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. He has seen hundreds of chaotic home environments nationwide, and his book is liberally sprinkled with amusing (and occasionally appalling) client e-mails and case studies.

Like many professional clutter-busters, he advises that the first step toward getting rid of emotional and physical clutter is to decide you want to change, then imagine the life you really desire. The second step is to demystify the causes, costs and conflicts surrounding clutter, and to incorporate small acts of organization, or daily rituals, into your normal routine. Next, Walsh tackles your home, from basement to attic, offering organizational strategies based on individual lifestyle choices and each room’s function and purpose. He finishes up with a maintenance plan, a cleanup checkup, and suggested monthly rituals for proactive planning and year-long order. Get organized, says Walsh, and I promise that every aspect of your life will change in ways that you never imagined. Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

Do you lead your life, or does your life lead you, asks professional organizer (and InStyle and Real Simple contributor) Meryl Starr. Realizing that most of us are overwhelmed by our stuff and our to-do lists, Starr offers relief in The Personal Organizing Workbook: Solutions for a Simpler, Easier Life. This workbook jumpstarts a new, organized lifestyle by asking the deceptively simple question, What makes you happy? If you have no idea, or have lost sight of your goals, perhaps disorganization which steals the time necessary for such reflection is the culprit. It’s hard to look up over those piles of papers, past our crowded closets . . . but it’s crucial to realizing the fulfillment and serenity you can achieve in your everyday life, Starr says. Four easy-reference, tabbed chapters are enhanced with Thayer Allyson Gowdy’s (InStyle Home) enticing color photographs (of neatly arranged interiors, handbags, desks and closets), while feasible strategies offer guidance on how to manage your possessions, to-do list, relationships and any less-than-stellar habits. Self-evaluation tools, such as questionnaires, are included to promote self-awareness the crucial foundation for lifelong change. Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

The single man can just about keep his stuff anywhere he pleases, whether it’s his collection of vintage beer cans, his motorcycles, his baseball memorabilia or his pinball machines. Austin-based writer Sam Martin approaches ManSpace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory with the point of view that, eventually often after he gets married and has children a guy’s stuff has to vacate the living quarters and get farmed out to the garage, basement or attic, which tends to farm the guy himself out to the domestic outback. This entertaining and wonderfully illustrated volume details the efforts of approximately 50 males who set out to create their own unique, in-or-near-the-home manspaces to suit such passions as collecting, sports, electronics, music, painting, woodworking and arcane hobbies, or simply to create a new kind of private hangout.

When in-house space isn’t available, these ingenious fellows even take to the backyard, as the author himself did, designing and building a 165-square-foot, fully functional office, only steps from his home life but worlds away in his mind. Some guys, like film and TV writer Bill Kerby, married in middle age, knew from the get-go that he’d never yield space to his new bride. The solution? They purchased a house with a backyard cabin, which he transformed into an arty, yet wholly masculine living quarters where his stuff abounds, including a classic old barber chair that his wife banished from the main house. ManSpace is a spectacular idea book with marvelous visuals and witty text, and it might just get a lot of guys to thinking. Definitely a cool gift item for that creative male who loves his stuff.

The fresh smell of line-dried laundry practically leaps off the pages of Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook. In this massive guide dressed in an easy-to-clean plastic dust jacket Stewart combines the efficient techniques learned at her mother’s knee with up-to-date information gathered by her formidable lifestyle team for maintaining every room of the home. She starts with step-by-step explanations of basic cleaning tasks (there are ways and then there are better ways), followed by room-by-room and periodic home maintenance tasks and shortcuts (clean when dirt is fresh, straighten as you go), helpful for those who didn’t learn by family modeling. Practically everything else about the home is covered, too: buying a mattress, storing wine, organizing a tool shed, preserving digital photos, emergency preparedness and moving house. While the book often reeks of Stewart’s iron the sheets perfectionism and fetishistic obsessions (most people can select a light bulb and wash a blanket without a page of instruction), it still makes an excellent one-stop-shop for cleaning up a messy act.

David Bowers looks at the duties of fatherhood from a contemporary perspective in Dad’s Own Housekeeping Book: 137 Bright Ideas. This book is for the Mr. Moms of the world, or for those who just want to be more involved in tidying up the home front. As a single dad for 15 years before my remarriage, I wish I’d had a book like this. Bowers shows housekeeping neophytes the difference between a mop and a Swiffer; he also explains why there’s more to cleaning a toilet than wiping off the seat, and how cooking is really a defense mechanism against cranky youngsters. He describes the Felix Unger method for doing any household task, but at the same time provides a quick checklist for changing an imminent grandparent visit from a housekeeping disaster into an illusion of cleanliness. You can’t beat that kind of practical advice.

The Home Owner’s Manual is a straightforward guide to taking care of house and home. Sort of. Coming from an imprint whose name says it all, THOM is accordingly bizarrely technical in places and plain weird in others. You’ll learn, for example, that a door is a hinged or sliding component that allows occupants to pass through a wall. Hmm.

How seriously can you take a book printed in trendy shades of turquoise, hazard-warning orange and brown, with drawings reminiscent of airline safety cards? As it happens, the manual includes many helpful tips from author Dan Ramsey, a licensed contractor, and his Fix-it Club, such as checklists for buying, selling or undertaking any household repairs. Useful definitions are sprinkled throughout the book and collected in a glossary and those illustrations are a clever way to illustrate different dwelling styles. While THOM is not without humor, it underscores the very serious point that being a homeowner requires a lot of work.

Those who want a more traditional reference guide to cleaning challenges will enjoy the perky advice and attractive design of Cleaning Plain and Simple. Donna Smallin, author of Organizing Plain and Simple, is an expert on the clean and organized life ( clean smarter not harder ), and her handbook is a sparkling example of how a well-ordered space can help you live better. Smallin recognizes that we all have different dirt tolerances and cleaning styles, so the book presents a detailed room-by-room cleaning crash course that allows quick bursts or deep cleaning sessions, always keeping in mind the hurried pace of modern lives. She helps readers maintain their living spaces first by de-cluttering, then eliminating dirt, mold, germs and dust from floor to ceiling. And she offers advice on how to properly clean everything from a toilet to a reptile’s cage. The book is neatly packed with plenty of interesting sidebars (did you know there are self-cleaning windows?), allergy information, safety tips and green recipes as well as chemical-based methods for getting a house in tip-top shape, making it the perfect spring shower present for both bride and groom.

Ellen Sandbeck, an organic landscaper and worm farmer, raises consciousness while promoting simple, environmentally friendly and cheap solutions to every cleaning challenge in Organic Housekeeping: In Which the Nontoxic Avenger Shows You How to Improve Your Health and That of Your Family While You Save Time, Money and Perhaps Your Sanity, due out in May. Sandbeck, who lives with kids and pets yet never loses her dry sense of humor or passion for a healthfully clean house, has terrific ideas for housekeeping that minimizes the household’s negative impact on the environment. She proves a spirited and encyclopedic guide to the natural and nontoxic home, covering every element of the paper-not-plastic lifestyle, including domestic odor control and indoor air quality, de-cluttering, making laundry less odious (try rain- or snow-washing), and general cleaning and disinfecting (with a terrific and inexpensive nontoxic sanitizer made of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar). Sandbeck even discusses fire safety and caring for cars, the garden and pets with health and the environment in mind.

Readers who equate natural with still slightly dirty should know that Sandbeck a former housecleaner is fond of using a toothbrush to get at gunky nooks and crannies, and has perfected a system of damp cloths (washable, bleachable, landfill-friendly old cotton T-shirts) on a rubber mop head to sop up muddy footprints before they dry. This crunchy granola Martha Stewart also covers common green topics such as organic food, recycling, reducing consumption, and reusing everything from foil to plastic containers and old clothes. Her sensible, safe and more effective methods for clean, healthy living help both ordinary families and the world.

<b>Murphy’s Law strikes the garden</b> What gardener doesn’t indulge in <i>schadenfreude</i> from the smug perch of an armchair in early spring, before their own epic mistakes come to roost in their exotics? <b>The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden</b> is a delicious ride through one man’s seriocomic horticultural adventure: to create the most impressive garden ever to set off his historic, rundown old heap of a house in New York’s Hudson Valley. And that man, William Alexander husband, father and director of technology by day meets his emotional and intellectual match while cultivating a few acres of fruits, vegetables, roses and cottage flowers. Encountering the jolly act of weeding more than 20 beds and trying to figure out how the sod mealworms got up the hill to his corn, his transformation to gentleman farmer well-versed in Murphy’s Law is presented in chapters including One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad, Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire), Statuary Rape, and Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden. As Alexander cans peaches, learns to garden with his wife ( like trying to grow mint and horseradish in the same bed ), fights Japanese beetles and works with a gardener who looks and acts suspiciously like the actor Christopher Walken, readers will relate to his basic philosophical dilemma: am I becoming my garden, or is my garden becoming me? Through follies and mistakes and temper tantrums and bad decisions that reveal more about personality and character than he’d like to admit (this committed environmentalist once soaked his vegetables in the pesticide diazinon in a fit over bugs), Alexander is eventually humbled and awed by Mother Nature’s final word, always delivered without anger or acrimony.

Apparently, Prince Charles was right: talking to plants isn’t barmy. As it turns out, however, it’s not the words of encouragement that keep the primroses blooming, but the huff of breath while talking to and watering houseplants that helps those routine-lovers adjust to changing wind conditions around the house and garden. This and many other rich tidbits in The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual will convince hapless home gardeners that they can have the many benefits of indoor landscapes without committing horticultural homicide. Here’s something the guilt-ridden might like to know, thanks to author Barbara Pleasant: some houseplants are only meant to survive a year or two (whew), many can’t cope with dry indoor air without daily help, and even within varieties, plants are like children, each having their own personalities and needing a slightly different approach. That said, this attractive illustrated directory boosts beginners’ confidence with a directory of hardy houseplants from cacti and succulents to orchids, bulbs and blooming plants. Pleasant discusses each variety’s characteristics and needs including water/humidity, food and light (she has a fantastic method for determining indoor lighting strengths and best plant positions). A handy symbol a cute flowerpot also marks the most hardy, abuse-proof houseplants (think Devil’s Ivy) to ensure that even novices can have immediate success.

The Victory Garden is the longest-running gardening program on American television, popular for its folksy style and Yankee practicality. Despite new generations of hosts and changes in garden styles, that unpretentious tone has remained refreshingly consistent, especially in books inspired by the show including the latest, The Victory Garden Companion. Released April 1 to coincide with the program’s 30th anniversary season on public television, the book covers every basic principle of domestic gardening in a readable, conversational style, from views and vantage points and braving the elements including sun, wind and rain, to entrances and exits, backyard fixtures and features, an excellent section on lawn (or the lack of necessity for it), flowers, the urban garden and the edible garden, which inspired the series’ name. Add step-by-step weekend projects, Inspired Gardens features on horticultural highlights from around the world, the Best Bets columns such as the top five tools for vegetable gardeners, Digging Deeper sections on current gardening trends including heirloom seeds and solar power, lush color illustrations and the reasonable price, and this book becomes black gold for any gardener looking for that perfect combination of how-to and why in one handy volume.

Mother Nature doesn’t need a paint chip to combine colors. Even her most garish combinations, like a field of riotous wild flowers in spring, have a grace and beauty about them that amateur gardeners often find difficult to duplicate. So America’s favorite gardener turns timid paint-by-number gardeners into bold and creative artists in P. Allen Smith’s Colors for the Garden: Creating Compelling Color Themes. Painting on a canvas as large as a backyard can be daunting, so Smith provides his usual reassuring and clear advice, linking home and garden colors to create a harmonious palette using the garden home concepts introduced in his previous books such as enclosure, activity, whimsy and abundance. Smith helps gardeners discover their color preferences and incorporate cool, warm and neutral plant hues against the backdrop of walkways, arbors, fences and other hardscape elements. The book also explores how texture, shape and light affect colors, and how to use natural elements as frames for outdoor compositions. Excellent photographs underline Smith’s points, and his plant directory features vigorous, easy-care and dependable varieties from shrubs and trees to annuals, along with seasonal combinations in each color temperature, that can be used as a paint box to create original, living art.