Can you keep a secret? I’m not only a junk drawer advocate; I’m also a junk drawer user. There I said it- I firmly believe that you need a place to store your doodads, gizmos and thingamajigs. The key is organizing your junk drawer. Today I am showing you my junk drawer and explaining how to be organized in this small space. Organizing your widgets will make finding the right doohickey at the right time possible. I don’t know whatchamacall- that, but I call it a success!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDJunk.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about junk drawers. Now, I bet you think I’m going to tell you not to have a junk drawer, and that’s actually not the case. I think every home should have a junk drawer. It is the perfect place to provide a home for all of those little random doodads that you don’t know what else to do with.
So, here’s some examples. So, in my junk drawer here we have some extra floral food for cut flowers, we’ve got extra chalk for the kitchen chalk board, we have little pizza tokens, and we have little felt dots for the cabinets to have them not make noise, and all kinds of random stuff. So, the key is that you get a really good product. This is a junk drawer organizer product; it’s specifically made for this. You can find these at almost any discount store. It has two layers. That really makes a lot of sense for me. I like this tray that you can lift out and then you can slide it back and forth so you get a lot more usable space out of this drawer. It also comes with a bunch of labels for common junk drawer items, so that’s really helpful when you’re trying to just get it really nice and organized.
So, there are a few guidelines of things not to do with a junk drawer. First, you don’t want to have a lot of things in here that have a home somewhere else. So if you find a clothespin, don’t just toss it in the junk drawer because it’s convenient. Take that clothespin into the laundry room and put it with the other clothespins. But if you have these random items like I’m talking about, this is the perfect place to put those.
The second rule is that you don’t want to have a lot of stuff in here that you haven’t used for a year or two. So, maybe you’ve put something in here that you don’t even know what it is. For example, I have this little metal doodad, I actually don’t know what this part is. And I put it in here on purpose to wait because we might find that we know what this part ends up being. And until we do, it’s in the drawer. After a year or so, next time I clean this out, I’m going to throw that away because we clearly haven’t needed it.
Another rule is that you don’t want to pile too much in this drawer so that you can’t see what you have. As we talk about all the time in the videos, visibility is one of the primary goals in any organizing project. So you want to make sure everything is very visible, that’s why I like this second layer tray so that you can, you know, gain that visibility by just pulling that tray out. So if you follow these guidelines, you can have a very successful useful junk drawer and not just a place to stash things.
Now, if you have a junk room and not just a junk drawer, we can help you with that. We have a Quick Start Program that’s free for anyone for 14 days where we can help you choose your project and get started on it and get it done. You can find out more about that at https://www.clutterdiet.com/quickstart.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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