Organize Your Junk Drawer

Welcome to Day 2 of the Whip  Your Kitchen Into Shape challenge! If you missed the introduction to the challenge, go here to find out all about it.

Yesterday's task was pretty easy, but today's will likely be a bit more of challenge. Today we are going to organize your junk drawer! I bet most of you have one. You know the one with all the utensils thrown in there that you just dread opening. (If you don't have a junk drawer, way to go! You can pick another drawer to tidy up).

I think the toughest part of kitchen organizing is all those gadgets and utensils. There are just so many, and they are not uniform or stackable. Also, most of us don’t have super large kitchens with 50 drawers where we can afford to containerize and perfectly organize every single kitchen utensil and gadget. (If you do have that, can you invite me over so I can cook in your kitchen?)

Here’s the basic principles I use to organize my kitchen. I recommend using these principles for any organizing project, but you can start by applying them to the junked drawer.

• • As with any organizing project, if I don’t use it or like it, I get rid of it. That alone helps immensely. Do I really need 12 broken spatulas? Things that are broken or I have no plans to use get thrown away or donated.
  • I try to determine about how much I use each item. If something is used almost daily, I want it to be very easily accessible. However, there are some things that I really do use, but not very often. Those things go up high or even in my extra storage area in my basement.
  • I try to strike a balance between beautiful and functional. It might be nice for each kitchen drawer to only 4 or 5 things in it and look like a magazine, but that’s not very practical. Ideally, I would love to have absolutely nothing on my countertops, but, again, that’s just not practical, so I strike a balance with a few functional items on top of the counters. I think each person’s preference is different, so try to find what works for you.
  • I love to cook and bake and really do use quite a bit of kitchen gadgets regularly, so I choose to store a lot of cooking/baking gadgets in my kitchen. However, because I do that, something has to go, right? For me, one of the things that had to go (or really never come in) is serving ware. I’d personally rather have useful cooking gadgets than a fancy platter, so that’s what I have in my kitchen. I serve most things directly from the pot, pan, or baking sheet. If you absolutely beautiful serving ware and use it regularly, that’s great, but realize something else will have to go.

I'm going to show how I organized my junk drawer some time ago, but please DO NOT think you have to do it the same way. Definitely don't let the lack of the perfect organizing gadget stop you from at least purging and tidying up what you can.

Personally, I absolutely hate junk drawers, but I just couldn’t come up with a better solution for this drawer in my kitchen. I needed to fit a lot in there, and when I tried containers, it took away too much from my storage space. Here’s the before picture:

Someone gave me an Amazon gift card, and I’d been wanting to try the DrawDecor organizer, so I splurged on this Customizable Drawer Organizer, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. (By the way, this post is in no way sponsored by the draw organizer product people. However, the link is an Amazon affiliate link.)

Here’s the drawer after. I did take a couple things out of the drawer that I don’t use often and added the cheese grater, but most of it stayed in:

Doesn’t it look so much better? Of course, I added these static cling labels so I know where everything goes. The static cling material works very well on this material.

I thought the easiest to show you how it works is in this short video:

Go ahead and organize your junk drawer.

Then stop by our challenge Facebook group to show us how it looks or share the before and after photos of your junk drawer on Instagram with the hashtag #KitchenChallenge. I can't wait to see your progress!