Everyone has this one drawer. This one drawer that collects all your items that don’t have a proper home: the drawer that you can’t keep organised to save your life. For me, it’s my desk drawer. The top and bottom drawers tend to collect random items from around the house, and while the other drawers used to house my uni notes and supplies, they’ve kind of turned into junk drawers as well. It’s about time I did something about it!
This is my desk, and my desk drawers (all from IKEA).
The first drawers holds some stationary, a box of random items, and some small electronics.
The second drawer holds some more stationary items, some smaller cables and gift wrapping ribbons. Oh, and tiny Tic-Tacs!
This drawer holds all of my notes from university, personal letters and cards from friends and family, more stationary, and my old laptop (which I kept because my new one doesn’t have a disc drive).
The bottom drawer is the worst: it holds a mix of cables, reusable shopping bags, headphones, electronics, batteries…
So let’s fix this mess up!
The first drawer was pretty easy to organise by rearranging the contents, relocating some items to new homes and throwing a bunch of stuff away. Looks a lot better!
In the second drawer, there wasn’t much I could/wanted to do besides rearranging the contents and assessing the necessity of the items. Not much changed in this one but at least now I know exactly what’s inside!
The third drawer was bad. It took me a few hours to sort through three years worth of notes and handouts, including getting distracted and pulled down memory lane. Since I don’t want to throw them away (valuable handouts in there!) I organised all the notes by subject and put them in this folder. The personal letters and cards got moved to another folder in my closet.
Now it looks like this! It holds empty notebooks, labels, file folders etc.
Speaking of bad mess, the bottom drawer was the worst. I pulled everything out (yes, that’s a discman!) and relocated and purged a bunch of the items, only putting back the items that made sense to be stored together.
This is what it ended up looking like. Putting things into smaller boxes can have such a huge impact!
So people, it’s time to come clean. What does your junk drawer look like at the moment, and where’s it located in your home? How often do you clean it out? Let me know in the comments!
I'm in the process of organizing my desk drawers once again!