Junk Drawer

As a part of my 15 in 2015 goals for this year, I'm organizing all the cluttered drawers, cabinets, and other spaces in our home. I just completed one of the worst offenders: our kitchen junk drawer. Here's the before picture:

Not surprisingly, I found many items you might expect to be in a junk drawer: paper clips, tape, rubber bands, a flashlight, thank you cards, etc. However, since this drawer has been collecting treasures for the past three years, I also found many more interesting items, which included the following:

• 1 popsicle stick
• 2 expired airline vouchers
• 1 pocket knife
• 1 digital camera
• 2 garage door openers (that do not operate our garage door)
• 4 handmade soap samples
• 1 DVD remote (to a player that we haven't owned since we moved in this house)
• 1 pack of Greek flash cards
• 19 writing pens (which is appalling because we NEVER have any pens around this house...or so I thought)
• 1 iPhone 3GS
• 6 Sharpies
• 1 Canadian flag patch
• 3 Christmas light bulbs
• 1 tube vampire blood Halloween make-up
• 1 tool to break out a car window or cut a seatbelt (which is supposed to be used when you get trapped inside the car...not helping much to store it in our house)

And the MOST unbelievable find of all...

• a grand total of 87 NEW batteries! Again, I feel like we never have batteries around here. Apparently, we buy a pack every time we go to the store thinking we are out. If our power goes out and we need to live by battery-operated devices only, we should be set for about 5 years. 

Most of the items in this drawer belonged in a different room (thank you cards, hand sanitizer, safety pins) or in the trash, so I ended up without very much left in the drawer. Don't you just love seeing organized spaces like this? I keep opening the drawer just to look inside.