Just for fun, housekeeping crime: the Drawer of Drawers

[Eos]

I do have a place for everything, and I also have what my family calls the Drawer of Drawers.  Mine currently contains some maple taps, a compass, four jackknives, keys to toy handcuffs, replacement Christmas lights, lots of foreign currency, eclipse-watching glasses, some seaglass, two headlamps, safety pins, a wooden top, earphones, wreathing wire, an Altoid box, a playmobile panda, keys, paperclips, stamps, bindis, a car-charger, some ping-pong balls, and much much more. 

What's in your Drawer?

[HomeAgain]

Ah, I just cleaned out our Basket of Bits, and by "cleaned" I mean I took half of it and moved it to a Drawer of Holding.  It has chunky yarn, mysterious keys, ribbons, viewmaster and reels, spatulas, lanyards and ID holders.

There's probably more, but I did move the tape and dice to their proper homes.

[Katy]

I don’t have one, but I do have a liquor cabinet full of stuff I don’t want children in right now. It has random moving stuff- extra garage door openers, markers, tools, etc. 

[Pawz4me]

A few sticky note pads, pens and Sharpies, a pad where we write our grocery list, a few paperclips and rubber bands, a tube of Aquaphor and a couple of tubes of lip balm, some ID stickers from the potted plants we put out this summer, freezer tape and Scotch tape and a roll of self-stick bandaging. And various other random bits.

We have three "Drawer of Drawers" spaces. One is what I described above, which really is a drawer in the kitchen. One is a decorative basket in the living room and the other is a medium sized, lidded plastic storage bin that lives in an upstairs closet. When we need a random item that we know is here somewhere there's a very high probability it will be in one of those places.

[Indigo Blue]

Basket on top of fridge: night light bulbs, candle lighters, Ricola cough drops, small plastic skeleton that you wobble the head and it bangs into its outstretched arms, making an ear splitting noise. (Been there forever, never got thrown out, and is used when someone remembers it’s there and wants to be annoying).

Kitchen drawer: lots of candles and votives. One can of Minwax polyurethane.

Drawer in my bedroom: Apple Watch bands, cell phone cases, chargers, tiny porcelain shoes son brought back from Denmark, bag of miscellaneous keychains, whatnots. Jewelry.

Husband has a bedroom drawer, too, but it’s too crammed full of goodness knows what….he doesn’t purge, lol. I have no idea. 
 

Everything else pretty much has a place, mostly.

[Clarita]

I have a drawer of drawers, a garage space of clutter and a closet of stuff of unknown boxes. Yes I know I can get rid of all that stuff. The garage space stuff and the closet stuff I don't really have to look through to throw out. We have just been going through our annual free dumpster every year and this is where we are after 9 years. 

[kbutton]

AKA a junk drawer, though mine is nowhere as glorious as the one I grew up with. Why restrict yourself to just one, lol?!? Various areas of the home have some version of this. Some things really don't have a category that's coherent or else have a category that is dependent on your brain thinking about them the same way all the time. Some things just need to be handy, and a junk drawer is handy.

[TheReader]

I do have such a drawer....mine has thumbtacks, tape (assorted kinds), can koozies, command hooks, the Gerber tool/multi-tool, usually garden clippers, dog nail clippers....hmm, I'd have to go open it to see what's all there. Pretty much all the "Hey, where are the....../Where is the....?" stuff is in there (except, not the nail clippers for humans, which are never anywhere). 

 

[SKL]

Well first of all, I have housemates whose actions I can't control.  I won't discuss what they do with random stuff because they are not me.  However, if you come to my house, you will see evidence.  😛

There is one drawer in the kitchen.  It's not a designated junk collector, but we do sometimes stuff things in there for practical reasons.

Official contents:

• Writing instruments.
• Scissors, tape, binder clips, paper clips, safety pins.
• Postage stamps.
• Too many note pads, often with scribbles from testing pens.
• Buried in the back, staples, maybe a stapler, probably things like wite-out, old rubber bands and similar.

Unofficial contents:

• Random expired notes from telephone calls, old grocery lists, maybe an old recipe or two.
• Receipts.
• Packing tape, at least sometimes.
• Diarrhea pills for the dog, in a ziplock bag.
• Coupons.
• Loose change.
• Random things that were mindlessly put in there for no reason.  (I would have to go downstairs to inventory it, but I'm too lazy.)

We have another drawer that contains loose small tools, hardware/materials and instructions from past assembly projects, flashlights that may or may not work, sewing kits, and similar stuff.

There's a third drawer that mainly contains small dog things, such as nail clippers, poop bags, and muzzle, but also odd art/craft materials.

Edited August 30, 2022 by SKL

[Emba]

I pled the fifth, but if we are speaking hypothetically, then hypothetically I have at least three drawers like this. I can’t even begin to list what’s in them, but recently I’ve found the extra football mouthpiece DS14 needed, as well as the long skinny balloons for making balloon animals that DS10 wanted. Hypothetically, that is.

[TechWife]

I’ve always had a kitchen junk drawer. It’s a good organizing tool for me. Basically, it contains things that need to be at hand but don’t take up enough room to warrant having a dedicated space. It contains, roughly: bag of cat treats, sharpie, scissors, small notebook for meal planning, Christmas candle tin, recipe book from ice cream maker, mailbox key, pool fob, spare car keys, usually some packing tape. It often contains other goodies like rubber bands, pens, pencils. 

[Carrie12345]

We didn’t have a spare drawer for randomness in the old house. I’m determined to avoid having one in the new house. That said, I know the “dog drawer” is currently holding charging cords and blocks, so…