It All Started With The Junk Drawer

Is your junk drawer organized chaos? If you have cabinet liners and storage baskets, that mess can easily and cheaply become a success.

The junk drawer. We’ve all got one. It’s the secret hiding place for all the little homeless stuff we don’t know what to do with. You know it’s true. Nowhere else can you find matches, tape, chopsticks, a pecan cracker, and an orange highlighter all in one place.

And it looks a little something like this. I’m having a neat-freak panic attack just looking at this picture. How did I let this happen? And why did I wait so long to fix it?

I told my husband, “I’m going to fix this drawer.” “It will only take me five minutes,” I said. I took everything out and threw away all the nonsense I didn’t need, like little packs of condiments and takeout menus for restaurants (which thanks to technology, can be found online and take up no space in the home at all).

I cut a piece of cabinet liner to size and put it in the bottom of the drawer. This will keep the organizer containers from sliding around and becoming a Stage 3 disaster again.

Then I put the things I actually needed to keep back in the drawer in a much neater manner. I bought these baskets from the dollar store for $2 total. One dollar for a three pack of the narrow ones (I already had one) and one dollar for the big one. And that liner was a dollar, too. In case you’re wondering, this is the cheapest project ever. And I was right. It took me five minutes.

As I stood in the kitchen proud of the quickest project I’ve ever done, I almost walked back into the living room to sit down with a glass of sweet tea and watch the new Property Brothers, but my mind kind of went crazy and somehow I ended up reorganizing my entire kitchen. Yeah, five minutes turned into about 3 hours. Sorry hubby.

I put drawer liners in every drawer, and I put the napkins in the back of the silverware drawer, which I actually think is pretty genius. Now setting the table is even easier.

I put rarely used gadgets in the back of the drawer that houses my paper and plastic products. There was always a big gap of nothingness back there just wide open, waiting to catch some junk overflow from the disaster drawer next door.

I straightened up the cooking utensils drawer and made it a little more functional, and again, that non-slip liner made a huge difference. No more pulling everything out to find the little knife that wiggled its way to the back.

I could have stopped there. I should have stopped there, but I didn’t. I got in my car, drove back to the Dollar Store (it’s only five minutes away from my house…it’s not as bad as it sounds), and picked up these baskets and containers.

And then I started on the cabinets.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that pretty, but it is organized, neat, and clean.

The worst part of this whole project? I moved everything around, and when I say everything, I mean everything. Now I spend a good two minutes opening every cabinet door trying to remember where I put the slotted spoon. I’ll get it all down soon.

Now I won’t lie, my kitchen was already pretty organized, minus that outlaw junk drawer, but now that I moved things around and put more thought into where they are and why they should be there, it’s even more organized, and it just makes more sense. Totally worth the extra two hours and fifty-five minutes. And it all started with that jerk junk drawer.