When is a hoard not a hoard?

Hoarders often make a lot of excuses about how their hoard isn't a hoard. Some of my favorites?

"I'm just a clutterbug." As if saying that makes the piles of junk okay. 

"If I had time, I could clean this up." Never cleans it up even though the hoarder actually has plenty of time.

"I'll get around to it." Never does. Never will. 

"There's nothing wrong with this. It's not that messy." Completely ignores the fact that rooms are unusable for intended purposes. 

"This mess isn't my fault, it's yours." And the personal responsibility goes right out the window. 

All of these responses beg the question, when is huge, life-disrupting pile of clutter not a hoard? Let me give you an example of something that looks like a hoard but isn't. You saw the matrix room a couple weeks back. That was before we started having our kitchen renovated. Now 3/4 of our kitchen drawers are in the matrix room. And because clutter begets more clutter, the room has also been made home to our pile of stuff to donate, the things I require for telework, and my bike. 

The room is barely usable for its intended purpose. There's clutter everywhere. I've even got a collection of used glasses sitting on the pile of baking sheets. If you stepped in the wrong place you could get hurt, and hurt some valuable stuff too. So why isn't this room hoarded? 

This isn't hoarding because it's legitimately temporary. We know the kitchen will be finished next week. By next Friday this room will look the way it did before and it will stay that way. The "magnetic clutter" that found its way there mostly did so because we've had to move the contents of other rooms around to accommodate completely giving up our dining room and living room to our contractors for a while. But we have a plan for cleanup and we know when we will act on it. The stuff is not there for emotional reasons, it's there because our contractors needed us to remove the drawers to fix the cabinets. 

Thank heavens this isn't permanent. It's driving me insane in the mean time. And for fun, here's what the kitchen looks like right now.

There goes the dining room

And don't forget the stove in the living room.  

But at least this horrible, disgusting sink is gone. It was this 'clean' when we moved in two years ago. I am so lucky that we can have our kitchen renovated.