Organizer Extraordinaire

Hi! My name is Christine Muccigrosso and today I am launching an organizational blog for Patch. I thought my first posting should be a little intro into who I am and what I do and what kind of experience I have in the organizing field. That way, when I send out a post about the best way to organize your sock drawer, you won't find yourself wondering “Who does she think she is telling me the best way to organize my socks?” Instead you'll harken back to this first posting and get in there to tackle those socks!

I think I started out as a “normal” kid, well as normal as any kid who likes things a certain way might be. My earliest memory of being a neat-nik was around 7 or 8 years old. I had a sink in the corner of my room (Don't you just love old Victorian houses?), filled with rust stains from years of a dripping faucet. I vividly remember spending a great deal of time scrubbing it to get the stains out. My love of all things clean & organized grew from there.

It wasn't until the show “Monk” came along that I realized I shared quite a few organizing tics with Mr. Monk and it somewhat alarmed me at the time. My family just laughed, “Turning the magazine pile so that it was perfectly aligned with the edge of the coffee table? Yeah, that is so you Mom!” Once I started to realize I had some things in common with people of the very organized variety, I started to notice more of those types of actions in my everyday life. I had always been good at organizing things, I was VP of Activities for Student Counsel in high school and was in charge of all the “spirit weeks” & dances (including Homecoming & Prom). Post-college I used my English Lit degree to get a job organizing high powered executives' filing systems, offices & lives.

Fast forward to 2006. I forgot what a perfectionist I was and how difficult it was to entertain (because everything had to be “perfect”) and I decided (at the great urging of my husband) to open a cafe! In fact, some of you might remember me from my previous life as owner of Café Meow in Maplewood (I was the one getting my OCD on at the sugar station). That cafe was über-organized down to the smallest detail. So one might ask, “If the cafe was so dang organized, why did you close?” Well, 2008 was a devastating year for businesses small & large (think Lehmann Brothers & Wachovia), and despite the amazing sugar station, we couldn't make it either.

Post-financial-crisis, I needed a new venue. It was through much self-reflection on what kind of business I wanted to start that I realized my first love was organizing and my second was telling people what to do, and so in the Fall of 2009, The Clutter Clinic was born.

I think the most important thing I've learned these past two years (or should it be 45 years?) as an organizer is that clutter is both physically & mentally debilitating and that every single session I have ends in some sort of “breakthrough” for my clients. Sometimes it's a little one, sometimes it's monumental. It's an amazing feeling to see the shift in thinking and to walk away knowing that I had such a positive impact on someone's life. I really and truly LOVE what I do and I never think of it as “a job,” but as a gift that I love to share.

So what about this blog? Well, in the coming months I plan to post organizing tips and if I figure out how to work the video camera (tech stuff isn't my thing), I'll post short videos of organizing projects around the house. I would also love to answer any organizing questions you might have. Feel free to email me at info@yourclutterclinic.com with a specific problem area and I'll pick one a week to address in my column.

For now I'll leave you with my first “Tip of the week”:

“The secret to a truly organized existence is to SIMPLIFY everything in your life. The less you have, the less you have to worry about, which ultimately leaves you less to organize.”

Happy Organizing!