I'm fairly certain we all have one of these. I'll even confess to having an entire junk ROOM when Rick and I had our first apartment. It was a two bedroom and the smaller room was just a dumping ground for anything and everything that didn't have a proper place or we didn't want to deal with.
This is what happens when you don't want to deal with the little bits and bobs that accumulate on your counter:
You can see I had, at one point, tried to corral and organize the contents since I have individual compartments for things. But the things, they mingle when no one is looking.
I would have loved to go out and buy new drawer organizers but one of my New Year's intentions is to only buy what I need for the first three months of the year. No wants. So I re-purposed the organizers I have which are by Rubbermaid. They are actually very serviceable but I do wish I had a few smaller compartments. No matter – they work as is. They also have a lip on one side that hooks over the adjacent organizer to they stay together nicely.
The first thing I did was just dump everything out and wash the drawer and the organizers. I also cleaned the drawer liner. I'm fairly certain I have mentioned these before but if not I highly recommend The Easy Liner by Duck for drawers and shelf lining. I have used them for years and whenever a family member moves into a new house my house warming gift to them is to line all their kitchen drawers and shelves with it.
Even Rosie approves.
Another thing I did was to lightly sand and paint the top edge of the drawer. Our kitchen is original to the house and these drawers have seen 78 years of use. The paint was quite chipped and you could see the various colors the cabinets were painted over the years. Green, red, yellow, white. I could have painted the front of the drawer too but I didn't want to go down that slippery slope. You know how it goes – you intend to just clean something up and the next thing you know you have ripped out your entire kitchen. We are hoping to replace the bottom cabinets in the kitchen at some point so we'll just live with a less than stellar paint job for the moment.
Then came the arduous task of putting things back in that belong and returning the rest to their proper homes.
I am not sure why we have such a large collection of lighters. It's not like Rick and I have ever smoked. I do know why we have such a large collection of pens (someone clearly has a problem…). I used to just shove receipts into the drawer but last year I started putting them in an envelope. The envelope didn't quite fit in any of the compartments so I switched it out for a smaller one.
It feels good to get it back into shape. I hope you found this useful – either by motivating you to tackle your own, out of control, junk drawer or to make you feel better about your superior organizational tendencies. Ha!
I have added a new category to the blog – Organize – because I like both reading these types of posts and creating them. Let me know if you like them as well.
