You know, the drawer that starts out in life mostly empty, but over time and laziness (and possibly a bit of space-time continuum issues) begins the accumulation of "stuff".
Stuff like the spare set of house keys for the pet sitter, the address book (and all of those business cards), the badge and key to the office you no longer have, the rubber band from the head of broccoli (plus the next 16 heads and let's not forget those bunches of asparagus!), the twist-ties, paper clips, binder clips, pencils, notepads, address labels, pens you permanently borrowed, coupons, etc.
The largest drawer in our kitchen is a giant one that spans the 36-inch wide pots-and-pans cabinet. It started out tidy and fairly empty. Over the past year and a half, however, it had gotten to where you could never find what you were looking for in it and to get it closed sometimes required a bit of "shoofing" of contents. I'd been wanting to take everything out for some time now and get it organized, but I hadn't had the time (or energy) since returning to the workforce full-time back in August (as a contractor) (some of you knew I'd returned to work, but probably not all of you).
Sometimes, though, the great universe hears such grumblings and takes it upon itself to see just how much you really meant it. So on 1/2/13, my latest contract was abruptly terminated when the company we were auditing discovered they had no need of auditors for 2012 as their lender decided not to audit them. (I suspect the lender's thought process went something along the lines of "well, they are in bankruptcy, all of their assets are up for auction or sale, we're already not going to get everything we're owed, do we really want to throw good money after bad?!?!")
So I suddenly found myself without scheduled work for an unforeseeable time period, which could be a day or two or seven or more. Friday marked seven work days, but I also found out on Friday that I have a new contract for 3-4 weeks beginning on Monday.
My proudest accomplishment during my unexpected time off has been to completely overhaul that drawer and get it organized. I am sorry to say that I forgot to take a before picture, but find your fullest junk drawer (or better yet, one of your parents' junk drawers), open it, and then imagine if it were as big as ours, and you'll probably be pretty close to visualizing how ours looked at the start.
Most of the bins came from The Container Store. I cannot remember where the white "desk" organizer on the upper right came from - it could be TCS or it could be from someplace else entirely. (The top of the white organizer slides down to reveal even more compartments in the lower level!)
Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!
(PS For those who didn't catch the pun in the title of the previous post about our new door, "Lovin' a Door", it's a pun on "love and adore" from the hymn "Come Thou Almighty King". One guess who titled that post! :) )
(PPS Almost everything was returned to the drawer - the only exceptions were 6 napkins that aren't everyday so didn't belong, the 2nd calculator, the dead mini voice recorder, the mini multi-tool that was a gift (and needs to go to the car), and a pen/USB drive from my defunct company. I even put Roy's badge and key back in there - they now inhabit that empty white rhomboid next to the orange-handled scissors. Into the spaces you can't see in the white organizer, I'm continuing to move things from our bedroom and the bookcase that would really serve us better being closer to the cars, such as spare keys.)
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