Marie has been sharing home organization skills for more than 22 years now.  She began teaching in 1986 at the local community education center where she developed an eight-week, sixteen-topic course including time management, food preparation, closet and cupboard organization, budgeting, teaching children to work, and shopping skills. Her classes have proven popular both in San Jose, California and Utah County, where she now lives.  She frequently teaches home organization principles at L.D.S. Church Enrichment Nights and at other community gatherings.  She also does in-home consultations, i.e. she has seen a lot of dirty laundry, cluttered closets, and stacks of untidy paperwork, all of which is very exciting to her.

Marie is a presenter at B.Y.U.’s Education Week and has published a House of Order Handbook which contains chapters on many facets of home management plus numerous worksheets to make running a home easier for any homemaker.  Project:  Organization, Quick and Easy Ways to Organize Your Life (published in 2007) with Deseret Book, Organized For A Mission, a Guide for Parents and Missionaries (published in 2008), and Organized As You Go (published in 2009) are also available wherever fine L.D.S. books are sold.  She has also prepared additional printed “home management” materials to help homemakers, whatever their needs may be.  She has made good use of her personal library which now totals over 300 home management books as she shares valuable and workable ideas in her classes, presentations, and writing.

Marie writes a columns for different venues, has had her own radio show  on AM820, and appears frequently as a featured guest on TV.  She also shares a weekly organization newsletter for interested women (sign up at her web page, www.houseoforder.com). 

 Marie also has interests in many other areas.  She loves to scrap quilt, make pressed-flower greeting cards for friends and family, and write personal histories. 

 She has been married to Jim Ricks for 37 years and together they are the parents of five sons.  Tom is a Math Education professor at Louisiana State University, David is attending medical school at Ohio State University, Brian is a computer science doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (and a new husband), and Tyler is attending B.Y.U., too.  (Evan, their youngest, passed away as a young child from leukemia.)

  Marie and her family live in Highland, Utah where she and her husband grow a vegetable and fruit garden as their summer hobby and share woodworking projects together on colder days.