Tackling the Junk Drawer

My oldest daughter called me this afternoon all in a tizzy and asked, "Mom, you aren't really writing a blog on housekeeping tips, are you?"  The way she said it, you would have thought she was asking Larry the Cable Guy if he was writing a blog on Shakespearean Tragedy.  Now, how insulting was that?  And from my own daughter!  It appears that she had been on-line and received a warning pop-up message that I had some blog activity going on..  She has it set up so she will get messages when I have a blog published on my As Life Happens blog.  At that time though, I had only begun to set up my blog and had not published anything.  She had only seen the title with the words "Simple Housekeepng Tips" and thought that I was going to lie like a dog in telling others how to keep a clean house.  She's a preacher's wife, you know.


As I said in my previous blog, I am attempting to bring order from chaos in a house that is in bad need of organization.  I don't have a dirty house, I am just beyond being an organized housekeeper, so I'll be bumbling along tackling one thing at a time until I achieve some law and order to the home I just charged with disorderly conduct.  I'm starting on a small scale and today I'm organizing the Junk Drawer.

My kitchen junk drawer has not been cleaned out in quite a while a long time.  A junk drawer starts off innocently enough - a screwdriver, pair of scissors, bottle opener, wine stopper, nail clippers, birthday candles,  leftover screws from a project - you get the picture.  But then it starts being a catch all for old cell phone chargers, a bracelet tossed carelessly aside, nickels and pennies, "dead or alive" batteries, half a pack of Rolaids, lip gloss, knife sharpeners, old keys - you know, just stuff you don't want to deal with.  Today, it was time to deal with it once and for all, so I slowly pulled open the drawer and this is what I saw:

Warning: the sight you are about to see may be hazardous to your eyesight:

This is a fairly deep little drawer and you're seeing only the top layer.

 The first thing I recommend doing is just dumping it all out of the drawer.  I have tried before just taking a few things from the top and sorting them to wherever they need to go, but I've never seemed to make it to the bottom of the drawer.  I'll throw away a few things and sort a few things, but end up getting discouraged and dump everything  back in with no progress made at all.  Here it is below all dumped in a plastic tub.

Ooh, look at some of the goodies I found!  Jewelry that I haven't seen in ages, a master key to my old workplace that I thought I had lost.  I also found postage stamps, some change including some wheat pennies and some bullets.  Bullets????  hmmm.....

The next thing I did was line the drawer with some pretty gift wrap I had.  I love gift wrap from those school fundraisers - it's nice and thick and stays put.  I used some pretty colorful stars as a lining.  You can buy drawer liners if you want, but I prefer using things I have on hand rather than making a special shopping trip.  Which brings me to the next picture.  

Instead of buying a drawer organizer, I found a couple of small loaf pans that I never use - and don't ask me why I saved Easter egg dye cups - it's just the kind of thing I do that contributes to my disorderly conduct.  But hey,  I did find a use for them, didn't I.  They're the perfect size for screws and things and they match my "star" drawer liner. 

After I sorted out everything that I had dumped, walked around putting things in other parts of the house where they belonged, I just dumped all the stuff I didn't know what to do with in the trash can.  If I hadn't used it in five years, I wasn't ever going to use it.  This is what was left:

It was a job that I had been dreading, but one that gave me a lift after I did it.  I have a new name for the drawer.  It is no longer my junk drawer - it is now my utility drawer.  I was feeling pretty good about myself until my husband came in and I proudly showed off what I had done.  "Look what I did today, Honey", I said.  He was hot, sweaty and stained from working in the yard and on a car for about 7 hours straight.  He stopped washing his hands for a minute, looked in my little drawer that was growing smaller by the minute, looked at me with a smirk and raised eyebrows and said, "I'm impressed".   "You had better be careful, Buddyroe", I said.  "I found some bullets today".  He didn't look a bit scared.  


Stay tuned - the chaos is not over yet.  Coming soon - how my house acquired it's chaotic personality.