Jump Start January: Week 2: Day 6

Jump Start January is rolling on and we’re coming to the end of Decluttering Week. Today we’re going to make life much, much easier by killing off the dreaded household junk drawer.

Say goodbye to those broken keyrings, prizes from Christmas crackers, things you keep saying you’ll fix and never do, drained batteries, short useless bits of string, hundreds of rubber bands, dried up glue, and whatever else might be lurking in there. Turn it into a ‘useful things’ drawer instead.

Here’s the declutter:

• Decide exactly what you want to use the space for. Be practical.

• Get everything out of the drawer.

• Wipe down the inside and the front of the drawer and allow to dry.

• Sort the contents into ‘keep here’, ‘keep but put away somewhere else’, ‘bin/recycling’, ‘sell’ and ‘charity shop’. Be ruthless, and work fast.

• Add dividers, pots, small boxes or other organisation. Most drawers like this need some structuring.

• Put your ‘keep’ items back into the drawer, and the ‘put away somewhere else’ items into their correct homes.

• Make a list of things that you might still need.

• Empty the bin and take out the recycling immediately, and get charity/sale items sorted out before the end of the week.

Last year I blasted through the junk drawer in the kitchen, and – amazingly – it is still tidy one year later. None of the things that were thrown away have been missed at all, and it’s functioning very well as the ‘food prep’ drawer.

So I’m tackling another drawer instead, the small ‘bits and bobs’ drawer in my chest of drawers upstairs. It serves no useful function at the moment, so I’m turning it over to sunglasses and travel things.

Where’s the junk drawer in your home? How grim is it looking?

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