Organize Your Junk Drawer

Do you have a junk drawer in your kitchen? If things are falling out of your drawer, it might be time to organize it. However, that does not mean you need to buy an expensive drawer organizer. Here are some ideas on how to organize your drawer without spending a dime.. You can learn more on Apartment Therapy.

This is how I organized my junk drawer without buying a thing.

Why Didn't I Buy Anything?

First: What was the reasoning behind not buying any organizers?

It was about more than saving money. In her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, tidying guru Marie Kondo says that your home already contains all the storage it needs:

She goes on to sing the praises of shoe boxes, check boxes, business card boxes, jewelry boxes — "basically, any square box or container of the right size will do" when it comes to finding storage for your tidying projects.

I liked her thinking on this, so I searched through my apartment and picked up anything I thought could be used to organize the junk drawer. Here's what I found — all items that have been in my possession for at least a year.

The Boxes and Containers I Found Around My Apartment
A shoe box lid ("the lid of a shoe box is shallow and can be used like a tray" — preach it, Marie Kondo!)
A cardboard box for checks
Metal lids from some tin containers in the kitchen
Various cardboard boxes — bottoms and tops — from an old Birchboxsubscription (bonus: they have cool interiors!)
A couple small pink and green boxes I'd had around for years
A small ceramic bowl
A birch wood container from IKEA
A jewelry box
The lid from an (almost) empty stationery box

I knew I wouldn't need all of them, but it was nice to have options for the next step: finding an arrangement that would work in the drawer.

It took about 10 minutes and a lot of swapping various boxes in and out — changing their orientation, moving up, down, and around — until I found an arrangement that used up the most available space in the drawer, and resulted in a tight fit, with most boxes nestled snugly next to each other.

Then the fun really started:

I assigned a storage task to each container: a box for all our pens, pencils, and dry erase markers; a box for paper scissors; a few boxes for our medicine bottles; and another box for my label maker (http://www.amazon.com/Epson-LabelWorks-LW-300-Label-Maker/dp/B005J7Y6HW/ref=sr_1_2?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1423069340&sr=1-2&keywords=label+maker&tag=apartmentth0a-20I have this one and I love it).

I used the shoe box lid to hold my two kitchen scales, and the ceramic bowl for rubber bands. Two more boxes went to hold all our batteries (which I left in the plastic packaging so they wouldn't roll around and become a fire hazard), and a roll of masking and painter's tape (a very handy thing to have in the kitchen).

And the jewelry box? I stuck the safety pins in there. This solution made me a little giddy, actually. The jewelry box has a snap closure, so the lid doesn't open unless you really pry it open — which makes it the perfect box to store a collection like paper clips or safety pins that you don't want spilling all over the floor.

When I was done, the whole thing looked like this:

And that's how I revamped my junk drawer for $0.



If this project has also been on your to-do list, I encourage you to go around your house and see what little containers, boxes, and storage goods you already have that can be repurposed or recommissioned. I was surprised to find I owned so many readily available containers. Believe me — I love a good "official" organizer as much as the next person, but doing it this way was quite satisfying.