Should You Actually Bother Organizing Your Junk Drawer?

There might be nearly as many junk drawer philosophies as there are junk drawers. Is it a place for stuff without a home but which you might use occasionally, or even frequently? Or is it just a place for stuff you don't know what to do with in any given moment? Or, more likely, a combination of the two? Should you actually bother organizing your junk drawer at all? Yes, but only as much as necessary for the drawer to be useful. Knowing if it's useful requires understanding what you're trying to use your junk drawer for, as prioritizing decluttering elsewhere in the home can be more beneficial.

First, you have to decide whether you have a junk drawer, a utility drawer, or a hybrid of the two. Ideally, a pure junk drawer is a rarity — an interim stopover for most of its contents, which will eventually get identified, sorted, and moved to a permanent home or trashed when you declutter your junk drawer. If you want to retrieve and use all the items in the drawer from time to time, what you have is actually a utility drawer, which should be more thoroughly organized than a junk drawer. You might find that it's nonsensical to categorize and organize the items in your junk drawer, but not in a utility drawer (or a combination).

Keep in mind that we're generalizing here. Experiences vary, and perhaps you have a case for ditching the junk drawer entirely. On the other hand, they can be a timesaver for anyone. In the end, do what works best for you — this is how success is defined.

Understanding the makeup of the stuff in your junk drawer is a necessary step toward knowing how much energy to put into organizing it. Even a non-utility junk drawer can have categories of things, like office supplies, crafting-related goodies, or tools. These might have proper homes elsewhere.

Consider the case of that lowly IKEA tape measure. You keep it around for measuring space when you're moving furniture. A tape measure has a home among tools, and if you have one in your junk drawer, it probably means either that you have a garage full of more robust tape measures and keep an iffy one handy for emergency measurements, or that you're not the DIY type but you do occasionally need to shuffle your living room furniture around. Whether an organizational scheme makes sense for you depends on how many tools (and other group-able things) you keep in your drawer.

But an overly organized junk drawer can actually become an impediment to organization. Where do these birthday candles go? Do you need a second drawer for things that are more random than the contents of your original drawer? The key is that categorization and organization are only useful when they make sense for you. And remember that exceptions will pop up: This is the nature of miscellany. For example, one implication of organizing a junk drawer is that you know what everything in it is, which isn't necessarily so.

One-size-fits-all junk drawer strategies are about as sensible as universal decluttering schemes. They might work well for some people, but others simply have lives too complex for their junk to fit in a single subdivided container. Things you can't identify or categorize with other things point to one of the characteristics of a successful junk drawer: An organized drawer should have a large catch-all section that is, effectively, a junk drawer within the junk drawer. This relieves you of the need to categorize everything you drop in there, which would defeat its purpose.

Organizing a junk drawer means containerizing things with, well, containers or dividers (these may be DIY drawer dividers or store-bought) to hold related objects. Even if you don't really need drawer organizers, it can be psychologically beneficial over having things floating free in a little sea of batteries and board game pieces. Adjustable drawer dividers might help you rein in a constantly evolving mix of junk.

Here are a few tips for designing your junk drawer storage plan. Avoid replacing the drawer with open containers or shelving, which can quickly get messy. Containerizing can be a little redundant; your junk drawer is a container for miscellaneous stuff. And containerizing absolutely everything wastes space. Put single items in the catch-all section rather than categories of their own. And, finally, you might find it difficult or impossible to label containers, dividers, or sections in your junk drawer, or see the labels when the drawer is full. And it will get full, unless you don't really have a junk drawer problem in the first place.