The Hand Me Down House: Unjunking my Junk Drawer

Last week one of my F-A-V-O-R-I-T-E blogs, Adventures in Renovating a Brooklyn Limestone had the most awesome series on junk drawers!

The ideas that all her guest bloggers had on revamping their junk drawers were wonderful! And they were all ideas that I could use too -- perfect combination, right!?! If you haven't seen these -- head over to her blog and check them out! You won't be disappointed -- I promise!

So after seeing how all the beautiful drawers I opened my junk drawer to assess my damage.......and yes, I will show you -- just to show you the before (can't believe I'm going to show this).........please don't run screaming from your screen.....

Yes, it's true -- my junk drawer is exactly that, a jjjjuuuuunk drawer! You can see by my little organizing baskets though that I did attempt to be organized at one time -- I promise!

The sad thing is, most of what was in this drawer didn't even belong in there. For starters, I threw away half of it's contents (still not sure how garbage ended up in my drawer that is a mere few steps from the garbage can...). We also had some medicine cabinet contents in our junk drawer -- again, not sure??

After purging, there really wasn't a whole lot left to go into my drawer......which means, I could really put some though into the contents of my drawer. I wanted to put things in there that we're using all the time and need to grab quickly.

One the items in our house that we use the most, are these:

If you don't have a little tool set for inside the house -- GET ONE! They are the best thing ever! I actually got them at one of those goofy family gift exchanges a few years ago. I didn't know then that I would absolutely LOVE these....but oh, gosh, do I ever! They save so much time by having them in the house somewhere for little things that need to get fixed in a jiffy.

Enough gushing about my teeny, tiny tool set though. The first thing I did after cleaning out the drawer was to vacuum out all the dust and corner dirt and then I laid down this shelf liner from my favorite store, Target. :)

It just dressed up my drawer a little, plus, it prevents all the contents sliding around (one of my top pet peeves).

I also purchased this cosmetic organizer at Target which works PERFECTLY in my drawer. I liked this one because it's clear and look how tall those compartment are!!?!

I needed a few smaller containers to store things like lotion, chapstick, nail clippers and one for our phone chargers. I had searched Target Boutique for quite sometime to find some cute, little organizing boxes, but no luck. :( Buuuuuuut, I found these cute little tin boxes that I had kept from my hubby's watches and wallet. This is one occasion that I'm SO glad I had the "hoarder instinct" and didn't get rid of them.....the one

occasion. :)

So into one, I loaded up lotion, chapstick, nail clippers, and a nail file. And into the other one went our phone chargers. PERFECT fit!

I also took a left over check box (I'm sure this was still in our house because of that hoarding gene I've inherited) and put in it some odds and ends that we use around the house, but not allll the time. I have in there some felt chair pads (you can never find them when you need one), some 3M wall hooks and adhesive, some touch up paint from our outdoor furniture and some appliance touch up paint.

I had a little white basket left over from the last time I overhauled my drawer and I filled it with my home repair kits, some Gorilla Glue, and some Allen Wrenches......all the things we need to do any home repair quickly and properly.

In the clear cosmetic organizer, I put our camera batteries and chargers in one compartment, gum and mints in another compartment and scissors, tape and a ruler in another compartment.