This morning we saw this fantastic junk drawer makeover from Kathleen and it's a true thing of beauty. But sometimes it can be hard to look at a clean drawer and think about your own dirty drawers (yes I'm 6 and really just wanted to say dirty drawers). Where will the legless Spideman Doll go? How about the bit of ribbon that is long enough to use on something … sometime … why would we throw that out? What's the real problem here?
Most homes will have an eternal struggle with junk drawers. Sometimes they open easily, sometimes things spring out of them like a can of compressed snakes and sometimes you never get things back out of them, only put them in it.
The real problem at hand is only keeping what you need. That's easy to do when you're talking about a coffee table you no longer love (hello, Craigslist!) or pieces in your wardrobe that you've grown out of (hello, Thrift Store!), but what about all the little things? What about the small bits of stuff you can't really part with, but can't really throw away.
The junk collector in us all wants to keep every bread tie, every pen that still has ink in it (even if it has melted crayon or something random stuck to it), and every nail, screw or small piece of ribbon that could potentially be used for something. But that's not always what's healthiest for the home.
When my husband and I moved several years ago we had two junk drawers. They were full of many of the things listed above (complete with legless Spiderman) and although we had hopes of one day finding his leg (he was vintage) it didn't so us any good to keep little things around when they ended up taking up far more space than a few drawers.
In reality they plagued our minds, the cluttered drawers really just created anxiety and gave us an out. An out to what? An out to making everything in your home have a place to return to. So in the end, junk drawers just end up being filled with junk and in turn creating more clutter. Instead, organize what you have, toss the rest and quit calling them junk drawers! Think of them as "necessity drawers" instead and see what the change of mindset can really do for your family!
Share your thoughts on your own dirty drawers (yup, still funny) in the comments below!
Image: Flickr member zeelicious licensed for use by Creative Commons
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Easy, I don't have enough drawers in my rental house to use one just for junk!
I had a drawer a day clean-out a while back when I realized that we had a "junk" drawer in every room, sometimes two... anyway we reduced it to one drawer in the kitchen and it has been renamed "The Drawer" because it isn't really junk it is stuff we want and use from time to time, just not every day. Things like spare light bulbs for the kids torches, post it notes, a garlic press and a yo yo... stuff we use... hardly junk!!!
Either you have one drawer and it's centralized or you have shit all over the place. I use the latter method.
Ah, c'mon, is it really that big of a problem? What if everything else in your house was well organized and comfortable? I like to think of junk drawers as boxes of sanity. You need to let a little chaos into your life or otherwise it'll find other more dangerous ways to infiltrate. Junk drawers are one nice stupid way to do that. Plus, it's really really awesome to have that one drawer where everything goes when you have exactly 30 seconds to clean up. Is one junk drawer really that unhealthy? I think not.
After pouring over this website for hours yesterday, I decided to clean out my "junk" night stand drawer. I literally threw away a garbage full of well...garbage. I know it's gross but it feels so great. I organized everything in little Ikea baskets with lids and added little Kotobuki bowls for things like hair-ties and safety pins. There's even a stack of small decorative paper journals in there. Super inspiring and hoping to tackle all the other junk areas in my home.
I feel like a lot of my junk drawer contents are random things made from plastic given to me by family and roommate in my Christmas stockings. I wish there was a nice way of saying "please stop giving me plastic things and instead I'd like candy or fruit." I feel bad throwing these little toys and trinklets away, but I have no use or interest in them. I'd rather have space for junk of my own choice.
The author didn't suggest we get rid our junk drawers. ..."organize what you have, toss the rest and quit calling them junk drawers! Think of them as "necessity drawers" instead and see what the change of mindset can really do for your family!"...
I think this is a fabulous point. A junk drawer can get out of control. Changing one's mindset about the purpose of the drawer does mean you get to throw away the half-consumed 4-year-old roll of tums, random screws, the key that doesn't fit any known lock, and that porcelain chip for the sugar bowl you know you deep down you're never going to repair.
This leaves more space in the drawer for a mint-tin with tacks, a tea-tin with rubber bands and twist ties, pens, allan wrenches, a post-it pad, super-glue (see, you really weren't going to fix the sugar bowl), and a penny dish.
The simplest, most useful thing I've found for junk drawers is to buy some hard-plastic organizers in both long, narrow sizes and smaller square shapes of the sort found at Walgreen's (typically white, to go with the inside drawer's color).
You can fit a lot of these snugly into such drawers, so they don't slide around, and, depending on the drawer, they easily corral kitchen implements or candles, batteries, small tools, bolts, screws, loose nails, picture hangers, etc.
Years ago, my mother, who could be an organizer par exellence, took it upon herself to reorganize my kitchen drawers with these hard plastic holders, and it made a World of Difference. I can find things sooo easily.
And when it came time for me to move, I lifted out those little organizers with their contents intact and stuck them in my moving boxes, and then put them in my current home's kitchen drawers.
It's always amazing to see what a difference a simple, cheap thing can make in one's life.
The junk drawer is a good place for things uncategorized. You can sort all day but eventually you end up with many things that just don't have a place, but a necessary.
It's hardly real junk, but it's fine to call it the junk drawer. What's in it? Batteries, scissors, lighters, matches, post it notes, pens. They're all things that don't go well with the silverware, plates, hand mixers, etc. But they aren't really junk.
I made my junk drawer the tiniest drawer in my house in the kitchen, so it is constantly being edited. Works for me.
The more I ponder this article and comments, the more I think that maybe I don't really have a junk drawer in the sense of a drawer full of misc. things. Most every thing in my house does have a place to go to so there really doesn't seem to be a need for one. Looking at the photo, most of those things would be stored elsewhere: gum in the pantry, tape/tacks/envelope in the office, pills/sanitizer/chapstick in the bathroom, etc. If you have a junk drawer as an outlet for chaos, who am I to argue against it? But I don't think it has to be that way.
On a practical note: the misc. screws/nails/nuts that accumulate drive me crazy too. I can't just throw them away! So I designated a container in the garage (yes, a luxury that not everyone has) for scrap metal. All go in there along with larger pieces before being recycled.
Read this post and went and cleaned my drawer out straight away! 15 min work instead of months of procrastination. Thanks!
cleaning out the junk drawer was what i needed to get started on the rest of the house. In the junk drawer i found a whole bunch of little toys my kids had recieved from party bags and party favours. One afternoon we took all of these little toys (and i have 2 kids so we had A LOT) and played with all the bubble solution, party poppers, rubber finger puppets, crazy glasses, face paint, card games, mini puzzles, moulding clay, giant chalk & noise makers till they got bored. I threw out things that broke or finished, but on occasion the kids will ask "can we play mini parties outside?"
I'm with Steph: I don't have enough drawers to justify using one for junk.
My landing strip is an area of counter right above the "junk drawer." If I need to tidy up quickly, everything gets dumped in the junk drawer and taken out after the unannounced guests leave.
I keep the junk drawer very minimal just for this purpose.
"How about the bit of ribbon that is long enough to use on something … sometime"
This. This!!
I think having one junk drawer and cleaning it out periodically is fine. My home is pretty well organized, but some things have no place... and they'll never have a place. They're too miscellaneous.
The larger problem is "junk closets" or "junk cupboards." I think more people have those than anyone wants to admit. A junk drawer? That's small potatoes.
@ adventrising: that is EXACTLY what I have in my junk drawer. Although, I like to call it my "misc drawer"
I sometimes think I'll use that piece of ribbon, but I never do. So either collect them and donate them or throw them out.
Also, my parents have 3 junk drawers in the kitchen, a few in the bathroom, probably some in their bedroom, and my old dresser is filled with crap. It drives me nuts and they can never find anything. THROW STUFF OUT.
Meh, I think having one (ONE) junk drawer keeps me less anxious. Some things just don't have homes and that's ok.
Everything else has a home.
One junk drawer does not make me anxious. As long as you clean it out fairly often, I guess.
Ditto the lack of drawer space -- I have two precious drawers in my kitchen that house my utensils, both everyday silverware and serving/cooking utensils. I would love the luxery of having an extra drawer for "junk."
My parents had a junk drawer until they re-modeling the kitchen and built in a desk; kind of a "command center" for scheduling all the family/individual kid (there were seven of us) activities. Now, I store miscellaneous items like siccors, tape, rubber bands, string etc. in a couple of pretty shoeboxes that I keep on a shelf. Also, I use my dining table as my desk because of space constraints, so there are no opportunies for storage there.
About those bits of hardware...
Years ago my partner and I got one of those little multi-drawer plastic organizers with screws and nails and stuff. Over time, we have modified the contents over and over, so now we have one little drawer for misc. screws, one for bolts, one for nuts, one for finishing nails, one for pictture hangers, and so on. I can't even count the number of times we have hauled out those drawers to find a replacement for the one missing bit in a self-assembly package or to replace a stripped screw or to fix a broken something-or-other... You can collect a lot of stuff like this over time, and weirdly a lot of it turns out to be useful. (When I was a child, I played with Grandma's button tin. I figure someday our collection of hardware bits will amuse someone else when we finally pass it on!)
Thanks!!!!
You rlly encouraged me to organize my 3 junk drawers
@honeyhaze, Agreed. I have no junk drawer since this kitchen has one drawer total, yet don't think a junk drawer would be bad. Bad would be a junk room, such as too often replaces a garage, tool shed, or spare bedroom, that you don't want any one else to see.
I approach the idea of the junk drawer the same way I do my filing and my organizing--I use containers to set limits. So, I have an 'in box' on my filing cabinet and all paper goes in there. When the box starts to over flow, time to file. Same thing with the 'junk drawer'--I put odd bits in there, loose socks, etc. and when it's full it gets cleared out. If the mate of a sock hasn't shown up by that point, it never will, so the loner gets tossed. If there are bits of something the purpose of which isn't immediately obvious and I still don't know what it's for at clear out time, out it goes. It's not so much a 'junk drawer' as it is an 'in transit' location until I can decide if the item belongs in my home or needs to go out.
The filing gets done about once a year, but the in transit box gets a monthly sorting at least, sometimes weekly.
I'd think the answer to the "bit of ribbon" problem would be "in the sewing basket."
I just tackled my junk drawer yesterday (I had no idea it was mostly just mounds of twist ties and rubber bands in there!), and I used some berry containers I had saved (made of a cardboard similar to an egg carton) to corral all the little items.
So you don't inadvertently accumulate more junk in the process of de-junkifying, see if you have anything lying around that will work before you rush off to The Container Store.