Home Sweet Home

Photo Credit: Michelle Hoff

“Home Sweet Home” and “There’s No Place Like Home” aren’t clichés to Michelle Hoff. For as long as she can remember, home has been a place where there is joy, beauty, safety, love and nurturing. Through her business, Home Coach Hoff, she helps people “compassionately declutter” and learn to live with less stuff and more joy. In fact, she wrote a book about it: Compassionate DeCluttering: How to Soulfully Surrender Your Stuff, an Amazon bestseller in Moving and Relocation and Household Hints. Through years of experience helping people create and care for their homes, Michelle learned that decluttering isn’t strictly about getting rid of stuff. It’s also about sorting through the memories, emotions, obligations and expectations that make it difficult to let go of stuff that is no longer used, working, needed or wanted.

A Wonderful Expression of Self

Growing up, Michelle spent Saturday mornings helping clean her grandparents’ house. She and her sister enjoyed it because it was time spent with their grandma, Marie, who made work fun. When they were done cleaning, there was always the reward of fresh baked bread. Her grandparents lived on a farm and their house was as beautiful as it was comfortable. It was thoughtfully curated with things they loved and no clutter. Michelle’s mom, who worked full time, kept their home clutter free, beautiful and functional. She didn’t hesitate to rearrange the furniture or change what was on the walls as a way to freshen it up. When Michelle finally got her own room and first apartment, she loved making it her own, because it was generationally passed down to her that home was a wonderful expression of self.

In college, Michelle studied Horticulture with a focus on Landscape Management. She loved the design aspect of it, which opened her eyes to the importance of balance, form and function. To help pay the bills, she started her own cleaning business called Maximum Joy Domestic Management. She only expected to operate it until she graduated college, but she loved the freedom of running her own business, the work and her clients so much, she ended up running it for ten years.

Going into other people’s homes to clean taught her that people lived differently, but had the same pride and appreciation for their homes that she had for hers. Being an empath, she could see and feel what her customers loved about their homes. The customer service she delivered was about honoring the spaces she cleaned and moving through them with respect.

Needed Something More

But after running her own business, Michelle needed something more. She had always loved the aesthetic of Room and Board and remembered how great their customer service was, so she applied for and was hired as a sales associate. Eventually, she got the chance to move to their distribution center to help amp up their service department. She took on the responsibility of managing the delivery process and later employee training and education. 

Like her cleaning business, Michelle only expected to be at Room and Board for a year or two but ended up staying for ten. She loved working there because it was well-run and guided by core values. But when the company restructured, rather than apply for another job within it, she knew it was time to move on.

Recovering Your Authentic Self

During this time of transition, Michelle became aware of the field of life coaching, which was relatively new. It appealed to her, especially the personal exploration it required to uncover what is important in a person’s life. She enrolled in the International Coaching Federation training program and began working on becoming a certified life coach.

As part of her training, she worked with a coach. At one of their sessions, they reviewed a list of goals Michelle hoped to achieve. Living in France for an extended period of time was on the list, but she hadn’t taken any steps to make it a reality.  Her coach knew it, so he asked, “What if you remove living in France from the list?”  His question brought Michelle to tears. That night she booked a three month stay in the south of France.

Michelle’s time in France changed her life for the better. While there, she hiked through the Pyrenees Mountains with certified life coaches from all over the world and began putting together what the next iteration of her professional life would look like. She had been digging around in people’s houses for over 20 years and seen first hand how large a gap could exist between the desires they had for their homes and how they actually were. She started Design Within where she combined her newly acquired coaching skills and the extensive knowledge she gained working in other people’s homes to help clients enjoy their homes to the fullest.

But when she launched her new business, clients were more interested in working with her for her design and painting skills, and while she enjoyed that work, it wasn’t her true calling. So Michelle went back to school and completed a master’s degree in Human Development. Her master’s thesis was about recovering your authentic self using “home” and life coaching principles and served as the genesis for her book.

By the time she started writing her book, Michelle was married and a stay-at-home mom. She chipped away at it for the next twelve years. She didn’t enjoy the writing process but she kept at it because she felt that if she could give hope to and help even one person be released from the weight and stress of too much stuff, it was worth it. She knew that having too much stuff had real consequences. She worked with enough customers at Room and Board, who once they got their furniture home, found it didn’t match the beauty and simplicity they experienced in the showroom. Often the problem was that their homes were just too full of stuff.

Freedom, Family and Adventure

Photo Credit: Michelle Hoff

In 2022, Michelle published her book and launched Home Coach Hoff, LLC. Most of her clients are women in their 60s and 70s who have distinguished records of accomplishments, but have become overwhelmed by their clutter. They haven’t welcomed people into their homes in years because of the shame associated with it. They now want to live with more authenticity, ease and simplicity and are ready to deal with the clutter. Michelle helps them slow down and create a vision of what they want their homes to look like that is so powerful that decisions start to make themselves. She also connects clients to people who can help them donate, recycle or dispose of unwanted items. Michelle says her reward is seeing clients become lighter, more hopeful and joyful once released from the stress of too much stuff and finally opening their homes to family and friends. 

Michelle and her family have an understanding that if need be, they could put their home up for sale in two weeks. This means they do not leave projects for later, keep clutter to a minimum and try not to hang onto stuff they no longer use, need or want. This may sound unrealistic to some, but for Michelle it is a reflection of her core values - freedom, family and adventure. Michelle believes that when we are overwhelmed by our stuff, it weighs us down. Letting go of unwanted stuff allows us to show up as an authentic, bright, and hopeful human being living in our version of home sweet home. 

Learn More

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