The Infamous Junk Drawer

Junk drawers and bottomless closets are like magnets for clutter. These are some of the most exciting spaces to tackle, in my opinion, because there is so much potential and it is such a challenge to create an organizational system that will work and continuously combat clutter.

It seems that most houses have a junk drawer somewhere in them that is home to the odds and ends that don't seem to fit anywhere else. These drawers are acceptable if they are in some form of an orderly fashion. I like to start organizing these spaces by removing everything. This allows me to see the full potential of the drawer. It looks much different (probably much larger) with nothing in it. Oh, and it allows you to wipe out the drawer and, if you choose, lay down a fun looking piece of drawer liner or contact paper.

Utilize small plastic containers, silverware holders, small buckets, bowls or cups to help contain your junk drawer contents in a more orderly manner. My favorite tricks of the trade with respect for junk drawers are trays with multiple areas for things like paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, thumb tacks and postage stamps. Trays allow for more room in the drawer so you can lay things out underneath the tray instead of having to work around the items. Now is the fun part: after you collect the random odds and ends into some sort of container you get to decide where to keep these containers in your drawer.

If this is more of a paper junk drawer for you, I would highly recommend either removing all of the papers altogether or organizing them into their own files based on the subject of the papers. Make sure if you take the latter route to keep up on putting the loose papers into their respective files instead of throwing them in the drawer because it's six seconds faster.

I must end with this... Clutter doesn't just "happen." Someone creates it by allowing it to happen. That said, no matter how amazingly cool your organizational system is it won't work unless you make it work by following through and putting things in their place.