Organize Your Junk Drawer (Day 18): 30 Day organization Challenge

Today we are going to organize our junk drawer. Everyone has one, right? That place, often in the kitchen, where we throw all of the miscellaneous items. The items we aren’t quite sure what to do with.

Throughout my adult life, I have fought the junk drawer. I have tried over and over again, with each new house, to get rid of it. But about ten years ago I accepted my fate, that I would always have a junk drawer, and I bought a drawer separator. Life changing! Even junk looks better when it’s compartmentalized. Ever since then, I have used some type of bins or drawer separators to organize our junk drawer.

Now listen, I call it the junk drawer, but even in this space, I don’t want you holding on to actual junk. We just don’t have room for things we don’t need or use in our lives. So, you know what we are about to do…take EVERYTHING out of that junk drawer.

The Process

I like to start breaking my junk into sections, as I empty my drawer. But you can do it whenever you want. The goal is to come up with a specific number of sections of like items. That number should be based on how many sections or bins you can fit in your drawer. My current kitchen has small drawers, and my junk drawer has five bins. A couple of my bins have more than one type of item in them, but it’s still much more manageable than everything thrown together.

Once you take everything out of your drawers, go ahead and clean the junk drawer. Now we are going to go through every item. Is there anything in there you don’t need? Pitch it. Anything that belongs in another room in the house? Put it away in its proper place. All that should be left to organize in your junk drawer are the items that have nowhere else to go.

Now we are going to put everything back into our drawer, in their proper bins. It’s simple, but what a HUGE difference a few bins and organization make in this crazy space in our homes.

If you have a bigger drawer, I am really a fan of maximizing the space. We all know that more goes into this drawer than we want, so let’s just own it, and make room for it.