Everybody needs a junk drawer

Everybody needs a junk drawer . . . or two or three or four.

Four! Why not? Who decides?

I have a junk drawer in almost every room of my house. You can see if you have a small house, with only so many rooms, you may need to clean them out and use them for storage.

Storage? Who says a junk drawer isn't storage. You never know when you might need a . . . .

Junk drawers go against all the principles of pristine organizing and scorched earth decluttering. Which is probably why I like them.

They are an important tool in the stuffstream.

If you have a junk drawer in a room, then when there's that thing you don't know what to do with, or don't even know what it is--it's like long, but flat at one end, tapering to a point, but it's not really a nail or a screw, which you have a place for in the laundry room, a little jar with screws in it, though it's too big to fit in that little jar anyway. But it's not a screw.

So. Open the drawer and toss it in. You can't throw it away, because it's very likely a VERY IMPORTANT PART from back when you assembled the toaster oven. And you know what will happen. As soon as you toss it and the garbage truck has hauled it away, YOU WILL NEED IT. The toaster oven will no longer work because you don't have the part. Never mind that the toaster oven has been working fine all along.

Put junk drawers to use. They need to pull their weight--and boy can they be heavy--and not just sit there contributing to the chaos.

Believe it or not, there are rules governing junk drawers. Well, maybe just two, and very loosely applied:


  • The contents of the junk drawer should have something to do with the room. Very loosely, mind you. But the junk in the drawer should sort of have something to do with what goes on in the room.
For example, in my junk drawer in the kitchen are wire ties--like those that tie up broccoli in the grocery store--a gillion rubber bands, used and new birthday candles, used wine bottle corks, clothes pins, a bag with miscellaneous string, a screw driver, a pair of pliers, an Allen wrench, superglue, miscellaneous screw and nail-like things, a rubber gripper that I use to open bottles, a small hammer, an outlet plug that gives me three plugs in one (there must be a word for that). And a whole lot more.

So this drawer is really "sort-of have something to do with the room," unless I use a hammer to crack my eggs.

But, yes, it does, sort of. Wire ties, rubber bands, clothes pins, all for securing bags and boxes of food. Just may need a wine cork, the one from the bottle I just opened was knocked around by the cat and is somewhere under the couch. The small tools are so I don't have to trek all the way downstairs to the laundry room. And superglue. . . ? Mostly for crockery I've dropped and broken. (I highly recommend the single application glue tubes.)

The second rule:
  • Go through the drawer now and again. The same way you go through your clothes. Look at everything. Put things back in, especially if you're not sure, but also take some things out and move elsewhere.
Elsewhere where? Well, the trash. When my cats are falling down on the job, the occasional mouse strolls in and gnaws on the cork wine bottles. Toss those. Some rubber bands are starting to stick together, a sure sign they're been there awhile. Toss those.

Move some things to another place, where you more permanently store things. For example, if you all of a sudden (How on earth did that happen?!) have fifty-two clothes pins in the drawer, put half in your clothes basket or that little bag that hangs on the clothes line. Just grab them up the next time you head to the laundry room.

So, like the box for the Goodwill, the drawer is a holding place, for things you do need, things you might need, and things you will never need.

The drawer is patience. The drawer is, "There's always another day, I don't have to decide right now, and in the meantime, it's out of sight."

The drawer will never desert you, or judge. Don't judge yourself either. Put that judgment right there in the drawer and close it. Let that little mouse of compassion steal it away.

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