Finding your Clutter Style

When organizing and decluttering our home, most of us would rather get a tooth pulled than spend time decluttering. But, then, some love organizing and decluttering like it’s their favorite holiday.

We can use hundreds of tips, tricks, and life hacks to help with this time-consuming task. There are also thousands of books and blogs just for this topic, not to menschen YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok videos.

Like many, I have gone through my home and closets and decluttered and tried to find intelligent and functional organizational solutions for my home and lifestyle.

I used what I had read from some of my favorite bloggers and watched organizing videos. Yet they help for a while, but none of them really stuck. Yes, some parts were organized, but other areas didn’t stay organized for long.

However, a few days ago, I discovered that I was looking at the idea of decluttering all wrong, and it didn’t come from YouTube or a blog. I was stuck home for a week due to the doctor having me stay home from a hand injury.

During this time, I watched a lot of HGTV when one morning, I came across a show called”Hot Mess House”” On the show, they have an organization expert named Cassandra Aarssen. Cassandra and craftsman Wendell Holland help homeowners turn their cluttered homes into clutter-free Masterpieces.

What made this different from the other organizations” shows (and what caught my attention) was when she talked about””Organizational styles”” I had no clue what this was( and also the first time I had ever heard of such a thing). So, on the show, she references the clutterbug organization style.

Once my hand was back to normal and I could use it again (it was my predominant hand), I googled organization style. I found the Clutterbug and another clutter style by an organization guru by the name of Peter Walsh. The Clutterbug has 4 types of clutter habits, and Peter Walsh has 5 kinds of clutterers.

According to Cassandra and Peter, knowing what style your clutter is, becomes a significant factor in how to declutter and organize your home in a way that matches you and your lifestyle. This also helps you do so in a way that will change your bad habits.

So, I would like to share with you what I have found and how to use these two styles to help you declutter your home and learn how to organize it in a way that matches your lifestyle so you can stay that way for the rest of your life.

Clutterbug Style

Ladybug

Ladybugs are hidden organizers that like their everyday used items to be out of sight. Ladybugs struggle to maintain complex systems and tend to shove and hide things, so they need large bins or baskets with fewer, less detailed categories.

Cricket

Crickets are hidden organizers who prefer storing items behind closed doors. They are also detail-oriented and like to sort their items into many small categories. A Cricket doesn’t’ mind stopping to open a lid or sort items when putting things away.

Butterfly

Butterflies are visual organizers who can easily forget about items when they are stored out of sight. They also struggle to maintain complicated organizing systems and prefer fewer and larger categories when sorting their things.

Bee

Bees are visual organizers who like to see their everyday used items out in the open. Bees also tend to be perfectionists who want a complex organizing system with many categories for their things. A Bee struggles more than any other type with letting go.

For more information and an in-depth look into the four styles and to take the quizzes to find out which style you are, please go to Clutterbug. e. You can also find her on HGTV’s Hot Mess House.

Clutter Style

The Behind-Closed-Doors Clutterer

Home looks pristine and well organized—until you start opening closet doors and are suddenly buried by file folders, moth-eaten coats, broken lamps, old kitchen appliances, paper towels, holiday decorations, and shopping bags full of purchases no one ever got around to returning. The BCD clutterer, Walsh, explains, “lives in some flawless future universe instead of creating solutions that work today.”

The Knowledge Clutterer

Stockpiles every book she has ever read or hopes to read and/or every issue of Architectural Digest ever published—believing, as Walsh explains, “that if she owns the book, then she somehow owns the knowledge, even if she never reads the book or takes it off the shelf.” Then, when she encounters an interesting article online, she prints it and stashes it in an overstuffed file folder.

The Techie Clutterer

Drawers, cabinets, and desks were weighed down by a metastasizing tangle of cords, chargers, remotes, and half-full USB drives, many belonging to clunky devices dating to the ’90s.

The Sentimental Clutterer/Family Historian

Hoards baby clothes, kindergarten paper-mâché creations, and grade school report cards belonging to fully grown offspring—wrongly assuming said offspring will someday want them; stores acres of unsorted boxes of deceased relatives’ clothing, tchotchkes, and war memorabilia in the attic, basement, and closets.

The Bargain Shopper/Coupon Clutterer

Prides herself on clipping coupons and sourcing online promotion codes; keeps her kitchen, bedroom, and garage stocked with three years’ worth of paper towels, mixed nuts, and orange Tic Tacs; spends $10 on gas speeding to three other megastores to save $10 on diapers for children not yet born; “is driven by the misguided notion that ‘if I own it, I am better off, regardless of what it does to my space, my finances, or my relationships,’” as Walsh puts it.

If you would like more information and an in-depth look into Clutter Style, you can find Peter Walsh’s guide on Oprah.com, and you can also find his best-selling book on Amazon.com.

Well, that’s all I have for today; I hope this helps you on your journey.

Thank you for reading Everything Frugal.