2mo ago

Please help resolve a disagreement in our home

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.

424 comments

Every household has a junk drawer. Be thankful you don't have more than one.
- This is not a junk drawer! This is a cooking utensil (mostly baking) that has no other good place drawer!
  The junk drawer got like, loose screws and scotch tape and batteries and scrap paper and whatnot
  
  This guy has it right. That’s basically my mom’s kitchen gadget drawer. Junk drawer has duct tape, 3 leftover zip ties, some loose AA batteries and the big screwdriver everyone seems to have
  
  The takeout chopsticks on the right must have escaped from the junk drawer/ packet drawer, looking for a better life.
  
  The junk drawer should contain nothing that touches food. We have a couple of those outside of the kitchen
- We have 3. And they're packed. But I know what's in there!
- As a household that has thankfully many drawers, we unfortunately have more than one.
- Every drawer is a junk drawer when I'm around 😏

This drawer is the solution. To everything...
- ...except getting something out of the drawer.
  
  What sucks is when you end up super frustrated getting everything to fit, so you rip apart the drawer and put everything back in all nice and wow would you look at that you can fit everything and close it easily!
  For two days. Tops.

You've lost this one, and if this was a hill you were prepared to die on I would get ready to lose a lot more.

Yes. Minus the scale, absolutely. It’s the tools that too big for the utensil drawer but too small to take up shelf space in a cabinet.
- This. The scale is the only issue here, but it's a big one lol
  
  You’re the third person to be opposed to the scale that I’ve seen in this thread. This drawer is exactly where the scale lives in my house. TBH, the OP’s drawer looks a lot like mine.
  Edit: I found a fourth

Every family has this drawer

Throw in birthday candles, rubber bands, and a few coins and you got yourself a proper junk drawer.

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

What?

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.

Every family has this drawer.

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.

Pfft you call THAT an overstuffed drawer?
I bet you can open it without anything catching the backside of the cabinet, nerd.

I wish my drawer was that empty.

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.

These misc drawers are the best way to worship anoia, Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers (also luck).

Yes, everyone has this
The 3rd drawer down from the top

I regrettably also have this drawer.
Attempts at cleaning it usually end up with the drawer now being somewhere else, but it clings to life somehow.
I think they're just a fact of life at this point.

Every family afaik has at least one of these drawers. Just accept it and live your life.

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.

That's not even a proper junk drawer, that's all kitchen gadgets, but okay... Yes, in my experience, most households have a junk drawer.

Your wife is right mate, this drawer is what makes a house a home.

Yes. I've tried to sort it, but there are too many small things that don't go anywhere else, so they are dumped together.
Trust me, that one is fine

A junk/misc. drawer? Yes.

Well this backfired on OP

Every house have this. And yours is very neetly organised. Congrats. May you "tiroir à bazar" stay this empty of small non identified cluter.

Not to brag but I have two of these and a proper junk drawer.

Not only does everyone have one of these, they suffer from quantum entanglement.

Yes absolutely
But not the scale tho

Yep. The "junk drawer". Even in my house with my diagnosed OCD mom had one of these.

Every family has this drawer.
Every single person does not have this drawer.
Every child has this for every drawer.

This is not a junk drawer, there are no coins or condiment packets.
This looks to be a kitchen accessories drawer although I'm unsure why you have a pill cutter in there.

Ours is a little more organized with dividers, but it doesn't look much better. Everyone I know has a drawer like that. I'd take the scale out and put it on a shelf. Scales are delicate.
PS, we have the exact same can opener, pizza roller, and grater as you guys.

Every house has one.

Where is the ball of asparagus rubber bands?

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.

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.

Junk drawer. Yes, everyone has one.
We have a junk room. LOL.

where's the sauce packets?

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.

Yours is actually much cleaner, but you cannot escape the drawer. We are all the drawer. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Almost every home has a junk drawer or other junk container. Mine has multiple.
All that being said, I don't think I've seen a drawer as confusing as this.

Ah yes, the "junk" drawer. I have three! :-)

The misc tools drawer? I have one that's overflowing. My parents have multiple drawers and cabinets of this.

That's essentially the "overflow" drawer. The only solution is to have less stuff... Or just live with it like i do lol

Definitely got one of those.

Sorry OP, we've got two in our home.

This is not a junk drawer. A junk drawer has flashlights, pocket knife, some tools, tape, bandaids, pens. This drawer doesn't have anything like that.
This is the food prep drawer.
I have three food utensil drawers. Dining, serving, and prep.
If you have a small kitchen, maybe you would combine serve and prep utensils into one drawer.
Can opener, cheese grater, scale, rolling pin, whisks, mixer parts, and cooking knives, all go into drawer. But like the bread knife and cake knife go into serve drawer, along with ladels, and serving spoons, for example.

Yes, I have a drawer like that. And yes, every family has this drawer.

3d printed some Gridfinity stuff and fixed a couple of these drawers. The rest are under way.

Yes, I have the where-does-this-thing-go drawer, for food prep items that don't fit elsewhere, and also the junk drawer which includes things like
Lighter
Weird long plyers
Twine
Self-fusing rubber tape
Random rubber bands
Twist ties that came with electronics
A random assortment of sharpies in various states of abuse
A weird scissor thing with a blade at 90° to a flat piece of steel
Random Lego pieces
Batteries that are good but not in packaging
Hearing aid batteries (noone in our house has hearing aids)
A single 12"x18" piece of Scotch Brite
Matches
A pencil with the tip broken off
A pair of 1/2" Cast iron pipe 90° fittings
A key for a car that nobody can ID
The manual for the microwave
A bunch of pennies
~~Coupons for McRibs that are expired~~ gone thanks for this thread
~~Our home insurance policy~~ nope, 3y out of date
A replacement impeller for the fish tank
An iPod charger (FireWire)
An iPhone charger (usb)
2 sets of analog headphones
A dishwasher cleaning tablet
So...there you go.

every family has this drawer. We have this drawer. The solution to having this drawer is having this drawer.