Junk the Junk Drawer

We all have a junk drawer. It doesn’t matter what sort of housing arrangement you live in. Apartment, House, Igloo. There’s always one drawer that just collects stuff. And it has the name “junk drawer”, giving us permission to fill it with junk. I am here to tell you — you do not need a junk drawer. What you need is a “often used drawer”.

I’d be willing to bet that if you went through your drawer, most of the stuff is completely unused. And by unused, I mean that it hasn’t been used in the past 6 months. Your gut reaction may be to say, “Well, I’ll just organize the junk drawer and then I’ll have easy access to what I need!” No! Do not do that. That’s how you ended up with a junk drawer. It didn’t become a junk drawer immediately. It started out organized. Until it wasn’t. One Christmas, my brother was gracious enough to organize ours for us. It didn’t hit me until years later that he was just organizing stuff we never used.

So here’s what you do. Grab a box or two and just start throwing stuff in that box. You are not looking for a reason to keep something. Don’t craft scenarios in which an item might be useable. If you haven’t used it recently, you probably aren’t going to use it again. Your goal is to create a place to keep often used items in a manner that doesn’t create visual pollution every day.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to make these decisions. I had to throw away a couple items that were engraved by my best friend from high school. Unfortunately, I hadn’t seen him in years and he passed away last year. But I kept holding onto these things he gave me. I made the tough decision to let them go as those items had no meaning to me. What I remember is all the good times we had, not the engraved lighter.

Take a look at what was in my drawers — old pens, promotional magnets, dead batteries, tape measures, etc. Same as what’s in yours. Then take a look at what I kept. And honestly, there’s a pin cusion and a spool of thread in the kept drawer that shouldn’t be there. Why? Because I rarely if ever use pins and there doesn’t appear to be any needles to use with the thread. Also, nobody in my house knows how to sew.

So stop calling it a junk drawer. It’s an often used drawer. Calling it by a different name will help you think about what you put in there.

Destination: Trash