About a month ago I was house sitting for my mum whilst she was on vacation, and I took on the enormous task of cleaning and reorganising her kitchen. I don't know what I was thinking, once you dive in and pull out the contents of half of the kitchen, you can't really turn back! Over the course of two weeks, I discovered not one, not two, but THREE junk drawers!! Arghhhhh! At this moment I knew I had bitten off more than I could chew. I had beads of sweat running down my face as I realised the enormity of the task, I couldn't just throw things back where I found them, I was not a quitter!! Ok, I might be being a bit overly dramatic, but it made me realise how much I HATE a junk drawer.
It ain't so humble, even if you start off with good intentions, telling yourself that you'll just use it to store the random necessities. It begins with some AA batteries, a pair of scissors and some needle and thread, and soon the drawer isn't closing because it's stuffed to the brim with warrantees, restaurant menus and 6 of the same Ikea Allen keys, because "just in case"!
Well, guess what? I don't believe you NEED a junk drawer! If you truely want to get organised, you need to get the idea out of your head that a "catch all" area is necessary for storing all the items that you don't have a home for. This mindset will only make your home more cluttered and make searching for something harder and more time consuming. I bet that half of the items sitting in your junk drawer you don't even need!
Ready for some tough love? Go empty that junk drawer I know you're thinking of, and separate the contents into these four categories:
Put away in correct "home"
Find a home
Give back to person it belongs to
Throw away or donate
Once you have done that, you should have cleared out your junk drawer - see wasn't that easy! If you can't find an appropriate place for those "find a home" items, or if you only need to keep them for a short amount of time (those T Swift concert tickets), than you can put them back into the junk drawer. Or instead, I like to put those temporary items in a box or basket, kept on the kitchen bench within view, rather than filed away (out of sight, out of mind), motivating me to empty and purge every so often.
After all of this, if you're still wondering what to do with those small items like pens, rubber bands and batteries, create a kitchen utilities (read: not junk) drawer, with a drawer organiser like this one, to make everything easy to find and all with their own "home".
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