Crazy Things In Your Junk Drawer You Need to Get Rid of NOW
We ALL have junk drawers. Actually, I have a ton of junk drawers. I have a standard junk drawer in the kitchen, I have a partial junk drawer in my desk and I have numerous craft junk drawers. I’M DEFINITELY GOING TO USE THESE BROKEN BUTTONS FOR A PROJECT ONE DAY! I remember learning the term junk drawer as a kid and being fascinated by it. “I can just throw junk in a DRAWER?!” It sounded like heaven to me. I’m a very organized person but I’m also a Secret Slob (a term I learned and held onto from “The Catcher in the Rye”) so I like sometimes shoving things in a drawer or closet and thinking, “well, we’re done here! Looks neat from the outside!”
What I’m saying is, I KNOW why you have these things in your junk drawer, but let’s figure out what we can get rid of.
1. Soy Sauce Packets
Let me ask you this. Do you have a bottle of soy sauce in your fridge? You do? Great!
DO NOT KEEP SOY SAUCE PACKETS, THEN. I understand if you don’t want to waste them, but stuff like this is better suited for your office kitchen for when Carol needs soy sauce for her sushi order and those jerks forgot to give her some. Come on, give it to Carol, she’s had a bad week. Don’t keep it in your house.
Please note: this also goes for disposable chopsticks, plastic forks, etc. You (I assume) own chopsticks and utensils at home, if you aren’t using the disposable utensils they give you with that particular order you won’t need them for the future.
2. Old Magazines
I LOVE old magazines. I love keeping magazines forever. I love cutting things out of magazines and pasting them onto things. I get it. I had to stop subscribing to magazines because I would just hoard them. So I started going through magazines and just GOING FOR IT. Cutting out the weird pictures I wanted, putting stuff in notebooks and in frames and on people’s gifts. I did a lot of decoupage. You know?
But you don’t need to keep the whole magazine. Recycle that sh*t! Cut out whatever you want from those magazines – pictures, recipes, workout routines – keep them in a folder somewhere and then, if you don’t use those either, get rid of them.
3. Broken Pens
A pen has about one function. To write. So once a pen has fulfilled its purpose, you should get rid of it. I have so many pens in the bottom of purses, shoved into pencil holders on my desk, stuck in drawers, even in my car. Do all of them work? Absolutely not. And I think pens are so small that we don’t consider them too much of a nuisance. But they are! Especially if there’s some ink there and they explode all over your drawer, which has happened to me. Ugh. Throw them away. They can’t be useful to us anymore. They’re fulfilled their destiny.
4. Expired Coupons
You know those coupons you get from CVS or Target that come with your receipt? And then you’re like, “YES I WILL TOTALLY USE THIS!” Well, you probably won’t use it before it expires. Let’s be real. So either keep those things on you at all times or just do not keep them. Every single time I have moved I’ve found a STASH of coupons that expired maybe 2 years prior. Ugh.
Please note this does not apply to Bed Bath and Beyond coupons, because as we know from Broad City those things do not expire.
5. Take Out Menus
I understand the impulse. I used to keep every take out menu (especially when I lived in New York) in an overflowing junk drawer. But now we live in the days of Eat24 and Seamless and like, we don’t need printed out menus anymore, guys. You can just find this info online. Also, I find that if you keep a menu for too long the info will be wrong. (Do you like how I said that as if it’s just something I’ve noticed and not a FACT OF LIFE?)
Bottom line is, get rid of your take out menus.
Any other things you feel like you need to throw away from your junk drawer? Tell us!
Main image via ShutterStock
