I think it's safe to say we all have a "junk" drawer in our homes. Right? Are you with me people? Hope so! Our junk drawer can be found in our livingroom. We use an old antique sideboard as our entertainment unit and over the years the massive drawer in this unit has turned into the landing spot for any number of things. If you open the drawer you will be faced with a mass of chargers, papers, phone books, calendars, pens and general bits o' things. Fitting the name junk drawer to a tee. About once every six months I pull the drawer right out, sit it on the floor and purge. Here is how I tamed the drawer.
First I empty and sort the stuff. Some stuff is simply in the wrong place, while other items are garbage. Sort, sort and sort some more. Once the sorting is complete it's time to consider the stuff that needs to be in this drawer. Containment is key.
The take out menus are stored in a clear plastic envelope-style folder.
The kids art work and other important kid papers, like swimming report cards and birthday cards, are stored in an accordian-style folder. I divide this holder by months and at the end of the school year I do another purge of the documents...this is a whole other post. For now, this folder contains the school paper work.
All necessary electrical cords are bound with twist ties and placed in their own quadrant of the drawer.
I found some old cardboard boxes (from cutlery) that fit neatly in one quadrant of the drawer. These sections fit pencils, pens, batteries and some sewing stuff.
Finally, the largest quadrant holds the schoolwork folder, the take-out folder, calendar and phone book.
Ahh...I love an organized drawer. How long this will last, we'll wait and see. Making organization simple and logical seems to make it easier to maintain. I'll check in from time to time to see if the junk has seeped back in. If it has - I'll pull it out and sort some more. How do you organize your junk?
Veronica Slater presents says
Well, our junk drawer is in our kitchen in the desk area. Because the drawer is small, I actually found a junk drawer organizer at Solutions years ago and it's been fantastic. It's a double decker, so the top compartment lifts off. I too seem to have a need to purge and go thru it when the ability to close the drawer is lost...But it's totally manageable (because it's small, there's only so much junk one can push in!) I also have folders for our kids' important papers including report cards. You and I are always on the same page! So funny. We used to keep a calendar in the junk drawer but I moved it by the phone for easy access. Also, I have written our kid's health cards numbers on our phone book cover to facilitate their work while filling out school outing forms. My job is to sign, they do all admin work LOL (but mainly I like to limit trips to my wallet!) Nice work, Jenn. I give my junk drawer a couple of days before purging is necessary. It barely closes at the moment!