January 2025 tiny projects challenge: Day 4

14 January 2025

For today’s tiny project, which took about a half hour, I turned my attention to a bank of elfa drawers in a closet in my office. We have a three-bedroom apartment and my office is in the third bedroom, right off the kitchen. It has a clothes closet in it that we’ve converted to kitchen storage. We downsized from two kitchens to one and my husband is a serious cook. So we have more than our share of kitchen stuff, despite a valiant effort at letting go of excess when we moved.

I had repurposed a bank of ten-runner narrow elfa drawers that in the old house had stored knitting supplies and put it in this closet. There are two one-runner drawers and four two-runner drawers. One of them, the bottom one, holds the attachments for our Dyson cordless vacuum. That’s handy because the vacuum is mounted on the opposite wall. Two of the two-runner drawers are used to hold culinary-related tools and gadgets. I didn’t really mess with them today. Instead, I focused on the three drawers (one two-runner and two one-runner) that housed a bunch of random junk-drawer type items.

Here’s a photo of the drawer bank in the closet so you can picture it:

One of them held the contents of our old kitchen’s junk drawer, complete with the containers that were in that drawer. Another was an accumulation of hardware from either storage solutions we have purchased since moving in or things we took down to crate space for different storage solutions. And the third had a fairly random assortment of batteries and matches and lightbulbs.

After taking some before photos, I moved the top three drawers to the dining room table. To be honest, junk drawers are my favorite type of organizing projects—I find it easy and satisfying to sort stuff out, make categories and toss excess. So this project was my idea of fun.

In the junk drawer, I made the categories make sense and I even tested all the Sharpies—I had no idea we had so many. (I tossed just three.) Once I finished, I moved it from the second slot to the top one.

In the deeper drawer (the third one) I put together the extra hardware from a recent installation of blackout curtains in our bedroom, bringing in some stuff that we’d stashed in the bedroom closet so everything’s together. I moved the AA batteries to my central stash of AA batteries in my office and stored the other batteries together. With all three drawers, I generally made it so that when I’m looking for something I can find it quickly rather than just hoping I’ll find it.

The before and afters are pretty boring, but here you go. I’ll put them in the drawer order they’re now in:

Drawer 1 before: