Do you have a bad case of “Junk Drawer Wars” happening in your home? Well, the drawers in my kitchen are the absolute worst, so much so that I’ve procrastinated tackling them for well over a year. After barely being able to open most of them, losing my house keys in one and locating them days later after rekeying my entire home, it was time for a change.

The Marie Kondo Tidying Up saga at BLB continues as we’ve reached Part Three in my kitchen. My pantry isn’t in terrible shape as I keep my perishables pretty organized, so I decided to get right to my junk drawers.

Here’s a look at the BEFORE:

There are three key areas in my kitchen that I’m focused on: My mail holder (now-all-things paper holder) on the wall, my four cabinet drawers and two island drawers. 

I began the process by dumping out all of the papers from the mail holder, compiling it with all of the other mail, magazines and papers from my countertops and sorting through each item to figure out what to keep and what to trash. I am a big paper hoarder that keeps everything from three-year-old birthday cards and wedding save-the-dates to seven-month-old receipts, coupons and local voting reminders. By the time the exercise was over, about three-quarters of the stack was in the trash.

Next up: my cabinet junk drawers. These drawers contained my office supplies, appliance and electronics manuals, hardware tools and pet supplies. These drawers were so unorganized, especially the office supplies and tools. I dumped each drawer out one-by-one, arranged the contents by type, size and frequency of use, and tossed out the items that were no longer needed. For example, there were old drawer knobs, mismatching extra screws, manuals to appliances I no longer owned and several pens and highlighters that were dried up and didn’t work. These items were taking up so much space in my drawers, it was beyond time for them to go.  

Last but not least, the two drawers in my kitchen island were no longer operable because of the contents that were stuffed in each of them: over-the-counter medicine, old prescription drugs, restaurant sauces and soy sauce packets, dozens of to-go plasticware and 27 koozies. After throwing away all the outdated prescriptions, sauce packets and half the plasticware and unwanted koozies (the ones I kept were mostly for sentimental reasons LOL), I organized the medicine and neatly stacked and returned all of the needed items back into the drawers.

Though I’d been procrastinating forever, cleaning up the junk drawers in my kitchen wasn’t as longwinded and agonizing as I expected. Thankful to Marshalls for the inexpensive drawer organization baskets that helped make life easy and Target for the drawer liners that are sure to keep things clean and easy to find in the future.

Take a look at the AFTER:

For the last excerpt of my Tidying Up series, I’ll clean up my overflowing home office closet and storage. Wish me luck!

Be Blessed…and Tidy! 

ACG