Khristopher J. Brooks Francesca Manisco and her favorite filing system

Today on The Local East Village, it’s all about cleaning house. First Brendan Bernhard recounted the epic task of clearing out his apartment after it was infested by bed bugs. Now a professional organizer (yes, they exist) tells how to avoid all that clutter in the first place.

For nearly a decade, Francesca Manisco was a radio and television producer for Italian broadcast programs. An avid cook, she also contributed a chapter on regional Italian food to “All Italy: The Book of Everything Italian.” She moved to New York in 1980 and found her true calling a little over a decade ago after reading a story in the New York Daily News about professional organizers. Ms. Manisco says she was fascinated to learn that she could “get paid to nag people on where to put their things.”

These days Ms. Manisco works out of her East Village apartment on East 4th Street, a one-bedroom unit that holds thousands of books and hundreds of CDs, but is still quite tidy. A dozen mugs hang from hooks that are screwed underneath her kitchen cabinets; her books are stacked two rows deep; her art supplies are tucked into a canvas box in a corner; and she keep documents in an antique secretary desk.

The Local sat down with Ms. Manisco to gather a few tips on organizing, including how to get more space in a studio apartment.

When people re-organize their apartment to create more storage space, what is the most common trap they fall into?

The first typical trap they fall into is to buy organizing boxes, organizing files, organizing gimmicks and gadgets and things like that. Don’t do that. Get rid of what you don’t need and then decide what you need to bring into the house. Declutter. Three years of the New Yorker, you don’t need. You don’t need five years worth of bills, restaurant menus, all that stuff. Pare it down, pare it down, pare it down, then you can go to a store with organizing items and decide.

The East Village is flooded with studio and one-bedroom apartments. How does one tackle an organizing job in those units?

One of my pet peeves is when people sit in their apartment and go, “I want that big sofa that sits four people.” Measure your house. Keep it in proportion. It might be a two-seater, not a four-seater that can fit into your house. It’s very very nice to have a queen-size bed, but if your room isn’t 7 by 10 feet — if you have a 5 by 6 room and you’re putting in a queen size bed, you’re better off with a twin. So, in other words, think of dimensions. You don’t need a 58-inch screen. Think 20-inch screen. If you keep everything in proportion, then that small apartment can look pretty nice. It gives you more room. The small sofa with the small coffee table allows you room for two chairs. Oh, and keep everything against the walls. Don’t buy anything that doesn’t fit.

What are the most difficult items to keep organized in an apartment?

The smaller objects: The pens, the pen caps, the paper clips, the rubber bands, the lighters if you smoke — and all these smaller items. People really don’t know where to put them. You accumulate them and accumulate them, and you never really throw them out, and you really don’t know whether you’re going to need them or not. So my tip is, you either get a nice wooden box and throw these items in there, and when the box fills up, you clear it out, or you keep a tray in every room to collect these items. But a small tray so that when you walk into the house, you empty your pockets. What’s so neat about that is that when you go out in the morning, you see, “Here’s my wallet, here are my keys, here’s my MetroCard, here’s my portable camera, here’s my cell phone” — it’s all in one space. Always keep a catch-all drawer, by all means, where you throw everything in. But every two or three months, clear it out.

What organizing tips do you have for artists or musicians who keep their tools or instruments in their apartment?

A guitar can be hung on the wall. If you’re an actual professional guitar player, you probably have five or six guitars, and you get a proper stacking unit. That’s another pet peeve. A lot of people like to do beading and necklaces or arts and crafts and Play-Doh and all that. Unless you can give yourself a table to do that where all that is on that spot, don’t do it. I have a friend who had arts and crafts all over the apartment, and one night she thought she was putting her eye drops in her eye, and she glued her eye shut. She went to the hospital. So that’s another reason why you keep like things together.

What if you own a large amount of shoes?

There are two tips out there. There are plastic boxes with drawers, and you can put the shoes in there so you can see what type of shoe is in there — if it’s a strappy sandal, if it’s an evening shoe, if it’s an office shoe, if it’s a loafer. The other option is, you keep the shoes in their regular boxes and you stick a picture on the outside of the shoes. That way you can stack them. It always keeps all the pairs together, and they don’t get ruined and they last longer. The whole point is when you get dressed you want to be able to see what type of shoe you’re going to wear that matches the dress or the bag and then you can pull it out.