My wife says every family has this drawer. I do not believe every family has this drawer. Do you have this drawer? Do you know a good solution to this drawer?
We have a silverware drawer, organized, maxed out. A sharps drawer, organized, maxed out. Ziplocs, organized, maxed out. Bbq tools and oven mitts, organized, maxed out. But all this shit has no particular category so fuck me right. I gotta have an awkward necessary crap drawer. Maybe I should post all my drawers and crowdsource me some sense into my kitchen.
It's the miscellaneous utensil drawer. We have 2. Up top for common ones like can opener, corkscrew... big one on floor for the lesser used ones like rolling pin, flour sifter, hand mixer....
If you are arguing over this, don't. Not worth it because there's no better answer unless you have a millionaire mansion with a gazillion drawers
Everyone has this drawer, but this one is too organized. It appears to be 100% kitchen tools. You need to add a deck of playing cards, a bunch of soy sauce packets, a few half-used books of matches, a few take-out menus, and some loose keys in order to do this drawer properly.
Yes, every household in the developed world has a drawer like this. It's for things that you hardly need or never need, but might do, one day, probably (not).
Why it bothers me: in a more sane world, this stuff would be shared. Every community would have a junk tool shed - not every household of 4 people, or 2 people, or (increasingly) one person. It's reminiscent of that drill statistic: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its lifetime. This is madness. Our planet is overflowing with junk. As a species we need to be smarter.
Remove the scale, electronics don't belong in the misc food prep and niche baking implements drawer. Once you do that you'll easily recognize it as the food prep and niche baking implements drawer. The scale goes on a shelf, or in a cabinet next to the mixer/food proc/salad spinner.
The "junk drawer" is supposed to have old receipts, loose batteries, the toy(s) you took from your kid when they threw it at your head, some vaguely kitchen-esque looking tool you got as a wedding gift but don't know what it is....crap like that.
That's just a normal large/specialty utensil drawer.
As others have said, this isn't even a junk drawer, this is the miscellaneous kitchen tools drawer. My homes have always had one of them plus an actual kunk drawer full of keys, batteries, loose pens and caps, tape, rubber bands, stamps, and lighters. This thing is organized and coherent and i jave no clue what your complaint is.
Hate to say it, but just about everyone I know has a junk drawer, myself included. Same as you with the other drawers, organized to the max, but the junk drawer will always be the junk drawer.
Yes. Most kitchens have a junk drawer. This is often where the household hammer is kept, among other random things.
Compromise in marriage means not organizing everything to death and allowing your partner to maintain some jumbled spaces. A junk drawer is organized, out of sight chaos that still maintains a certain logic.
We’ve also floated the idea that not having a junk drawer in the kitchen may be a marker of psychopathy. I jest, but also not. Just know, junk drawers are common, diverse, and almost as expected as silverware drawers.
Yes, every family has this drawer, and every family also has a member who despises this drawer and fruitlessly reorganizes, labels and makes it easy for everyone else but it takes one load of dishes and…
What were we talking about again. Oh yeah, that’s normal.
Yep, we have that drawer. Ours is much larger and much more full. My wife loves baking, which accounts for a lot of it - there's about 5 pie servers in there, for example, along with various spatulas of many sizes. There are also three ice cream scoops so the odds are good I'll have at least one that is clean when I need it. Lemon zester, spoons, all kinds of baking and cooking-related stuff. The rubber things you use to get stubborn jars open. I can't even think of what else is in there, but there's a lot.
This is separate from the drawer that has rarely-used knives (we have a knife block for the commonly used knives), cake decorating materials, and similar stuff.
And both of those are separate from the designated "junk drawer" that has random stuff like box cutters, can coozies, gift cards, coupons, etc.
What do you mean? This is organized! And I have such a drawer too. This is the collection of slightly large kitchen tools that are not large enough to place them in the cupboard.
Whether every family has this drawer or not, I wouldn't know, so I'm not very helpful with settling your argument. I'd bet, every family has this drawer though. Because everyone must have those kinds of utensils, and there's no other logical place to store them. Some people hang some of them on the wall, but even then, there are some that cannot be hung on the wall. Those go into this drawer.
Every single organization system will fail. When we try to put things into categories, there will always be some things that don't fit. That is why every organization scheme needs a miscellaneous category. That seems to be the purpose of this drawer, and that's great.
I am ridiculously organized and clean. I do that 5 minutes of swift pickup/wipe a few times each day.
That said, still have this drawer. There is always a collection of items that don't seem to go "together" but they're always used. That's what this drawer is for.
I don't get the stock picture though. It's an obvious arrangement of tools that haven't even been used.
It's just the cost of being someone who actually uses their kitchen. We have the garlic press, scissors, pizza cutter, bench scrapers, microplaners, thermometers, etc... in there. All useful things that fit poorly with other things, so they get a drawer all to themselves.
The junk drawer with batteries and twist ties is another drawer.
Looks like a junk drawer or a multi purpose drawer in any kitchen. There is often one near the sink. In some larger cabinet sets, the small drawer like that is on the end. But it varies where everyone has it. Maybe all the decent sized kitchens do.
Everyone has that drawer. You can tidy it with spacers to make it look a bit less hectic but it will still be that drawer full of random specialty shit.
Entropy wins.... always. You must free yourself and accept this. You cannot defeat entropy.
Every house has one. My mother with legit OCD had one... though she claimed it was a 'Miscellaneous' drawer and not a junk drawer. (To be fair, it was a well organized junk drawer at any rate.)
This isn't a true junk drawer in my mind because it looks to be all cooking implements. I have a junk drawer, but it contains like rubber bands, rando pencils, gum, etc.
We moved to a new house, and I was storing things like a hammer, nails, screws etc. In a kitchen drawer for hanging the 5 millions things to go on the wall. My wife asks me if the drawer will eventually be cleared out.
as others have said, "yes" most people have the misfit drawer. We always called it the "horrible drawer_ because ladles and can openers and things would often catch and make it hard to open. I say embrace it, everyone deserves love even if not everyone fits in perfectly
Sorry man but I have to side with your wife here. We have even one such junk drawer per room.
In the kitchen with scissors, jar opener, potato peeler, nut cracker, sticks, tooth picks...
In the living room with matches, candles, coasters, birthday decoration, fertilizer for house plants, ...
In the bedroom we even have one per person with protective gear for sports, single socks that have their partner missing, scarves, baseball cap, luggage straps, ...
Could go on with bathroom, laundry room etc. Junk drawers for the win!
We have 3 of them: misc kitchen utensils and tools, misc containers, and misc stuff that does not even belong in the kitchen, but ends up there because that's the only drawers in the house that don't have clothes in them.
If you want to organize it some, you can build or buy dividers and split it up.
I'd filter out metal things that has handles like this pizza cutter and meat hammer and try to give them some sort of a stand or a magnet surface to stick them on.
Dear OP, the only odd thing about your drawer is that your garlic press in in there (unless this is your backup garlic press of course). In our household, we have it in the main cutlery drawer.
BTW, we have several such drawers spread out over our home: one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the home office and several in the garage.
Not in the kitchen but I have a (very large) one for electronics and batteries and it's the worst. Tools and screws. Office supplies.
This kitchen one you could neat up a bit if it really annoys you. Put the scales in a cupboard upright against the side. Maybe get a nicer scale, that one looks naff. Trash the salad shears. What a terrible idea. Put the pizza / dough metal thingie on a wall mounted magnet for knives and stuff. Maybe put some of the other metal stuff there idk. Everything else is pretty small so you can put in dividers for that. The grater and ladle go in the same compartment.
Unless of course you think your wife should tidy up this drawer in which case you can just absolutely fuck off. Into the ocean. Die and get eaten by scavengers.
Edit: oh, that's a meat tenderiser, not a ladle. Everything else stands.
At my parents we had a similar drawer with miscellaneous stuff but it was organised so it looked somewhat tidy. Currently I don't have a drawer like this, cuz I have a tiny kitchen with only one drawer which is reserved for cutlery.
This drawer is government issued when a house is built. Every family had this drawer. It is load bearing. Removing the contents of this drawer will cause irreparable damage to the house.
Yes, every family I've ever known has had a drawer with bulky oversized kitchen utensils and gadgets. The harder you try to organize these things, the more you will realize that you'd just end up with an entire drawer taken up by a single pizza cutter, garlic press, or zester. Theoretically, if you had enough storage space in your kitchen you could do that, but these things are used so infrequently that they either get shoved into one drawer which fully takes up that one space with disorganized chaos, or placed in a receptacle of some sort to sit on the countertop for when you need it, which is ugly and takes up then takes up the counter space instead.
I'd be more inclined to call this a misc utensils drawer. I have one just like it, with many of the same items, but I also have a true "junk drawer", but it has anything but utensils in it. Like, batteries, screws, magnifying glass, fire starters, a deck of cards, etc. All of the shit that ends up near the kitchen that doesn't have a whole space dedicated to similar things, finds a home in the junk drawer.
im afraid that everyone has the forbidden drawer. the drawer that should never be opened except as a last ditch effort to find that one appliance that seems to elude you in every other drawer. you can try to destroy the drawer, but it will always come back in some form.
The problem is not the organization or lack thereof, the problem is that someone in your household buys too many niche specialized single-purpose kitchen tools. Wtf is that thing with the green handle?
I try to donate any kitchen tool that I haven't used in a year or two.
The only reason I don't have such a drawer, is an overall lack of drawers in my house, don't really have one to spare to be a junk drawer.
Which is a damn shame because I could really use a drawer to throw some miscellaneous odds and hands that don't have any other designated place to live.
It's more of a "Junk Drawer" in my family. Just for things that have no relevant places or are easily categorized, but are important enough not to keep somewhere more out of the way. Always contains at least one item that makes it near impossible to open the drawer on first pull and requires manipulation to open. For my family, it's usually a hammer.
Yeah, we have this drawer. There are always going to be some tools you use in the kitchen enough to justify the purchase but not enough to be in any of the daily driver drawers. Honestly, this is not bad, we have a drawer that is the awkward necessary crap drawer for the awkward necessary crap drawer.