Kitchen Organization Part 2: Junk Drawers and Plastic Containers

I spent an unreasonable amount of time last week digging through a pile of stuff in our junk drawer, trying to find a screwdriver and tape measure. Turns out they weren't actually in the junk drawer at that time, but I would have been able to figure that out a lot sooner if the drawer had been organized!

Here's what our junk drawer looked like before:

I dragged everything out of the drawer and grouped the items. Some went to different places in the house, like the sinus medication (to the medicine cabinet) and the stud finder (to the garage). Then I found three Amazon shipping boxes that we had lying around, cut them short enough to fit in the drawer and started taping them and pieces of the box flaps together into a sort of Frankenstein drawer organizer exactly the size of the drawer.

Not gorgeous, but much better. Here's the before and after:

I have seen some tutorials on Pinterest that show how to cover these sorts of cardboard organizers in wrapping paper (check out The Stonybrook House's tutorial here) and that might be something I would do later if I feel the need for my junk drawer to be pretty as well as functional.

The junk had also crept down into the two drawers below this one. I moved some of the overflow junk to other places in the house (a first aid kit to the bathroom, lightbulbs to the garage). What was left was a portion of our collection of plastic grocery store bags. We try not to bring too many of these home. I like to try to use re-usable bags whenever I can, but we still end up with a ton of these. We re-use all of them that make it into the house, though. My husband uses this stash to put his work lunches in.

I found a tutorial online (here, from Infarrantly Creative) on how to roll these bags up so that they will fit into and dispense from a Clorox/Lysol wipe container. Look at how much less space all these bags take up! And the container is only half full!

I used spray adhesive to glue some scrapbook paper and a label to the container, just to remind my husband where to look for his lunch bags.

With all of the room freed up, I moved some of our overflowing tupperware/food storage containers into this drawer. I put all of our favorites in here so they are easy to get to when we want to put leftovers in the fridge.

Next up is the undersink cabinet and roping my husband into helping me construct some sort of bakeware organizer for the useless blind corner cabinet in the kitchen island.