Getting in my Drawers (40 Days/40 Bags)

I don't think most people would willingly go out and buy a bag of junk to bring it home to decorate their house. But I guarantee almost everyone has a junk drawer in their house.

Maybe it looks something like this?



Here's the steps that I did to tame the junk drawer.


This junk drawer is that mishmash of coupons, take-out menus, stamps, and scraps of "important" papers. (If they were truly that important, would they be crammed into an overstuffed drawer?)

Start by taking everything out of the drawer and wiping it down.

Sort items into several piles. Start with the first item (for instance, a menu) and place it into its own pile. Then take the next item. If it is the same type of item as the first one, put it in the same pile. If it isn't, then start a new pile (for instance, coupons). Continue until every item is in its own pile. It may take a while to sort through a pile like this, but it goes quicker as you go along.






Don't go into this process with a pre-conceived idea of what the piles should be. Let the items themselves decide what types of piles you create.

Many of the papers were not actually important, but just papers that got shoved in the drawer "just because". Those ended up heading right to the trash.

Once everything is sorted into piles, figure out how to best organize the items, even if it means purchasing items to aid in the organization process.

The two items I used were a three-ring binder with plastic sheets and a coupon holder.

Going one pile at a time, I got rid of any expired coupons or menus for restaurants that are either out of business or that we don't visit.

In the coupon holder, I put coupons, rewards cards, and gift cards, plus checkbooks, deposit slips, stamps, and address labels. On the front of the coupon holder, I stuck a post-it note with a list of the contents so I could see at a glance what's in that organizer.

For the three-ring binder, I put menus (grouped by cuisine) in the plastic sheets, and included any current coupons with the menu.

The KonMari method suggests gathering all items of a kind from around the house, so I gathered up all scissors, tape, and pens/pencils/highlighters to add to the piles that I had created. For the scissors, I put them all into the drawer. Even though we have a LOT of scissors, I am keeping them all because scissors tend to disappear.

For pens and pencils, I tested every single one. If it wasn't working, it went into the trash. If the cap was missing, it went into the trash. If I didn't like it, it went in the trash. (See a pattern?)

I decided on five pens, two markers, two highlighters, and two pencils to go in the drawer. The rest, I divided up by type and placed in zip-top bags to store with office supplies.



The other items that found a place in the drawer are box-tops for education (already taped on paper and ready to submit when a contest comes up), silica packets (which I keep on hand in case I have things that need to be dried out), and mini super glue tubes.

Instead of going with one very long drawer, I went with two smaller ones.

That left a variety of miscellaneous stuff. For right now, I put them in a small plastic box. As I go through the rest of the house, I'll be going back to that box to see what needs to be kept and put away, and what truly is junk to be trashed.



Here's the end result of the two drawers.







In all, one small bag of trash came out of those drawers. That's bag #3 for the 40 days/40 bags challenge!