Monday Challenge: Junk Drawer Clean-up

Writing this blog is motivating. It forces encourages me to continually improve our home, cook delicious meals and try new things (like sewing and gardening). I've had a few people ask me where I get my ideas, and the answer is pretty simple. A majority of my ideas come from the variety of blogs I read, along with my other new love -- Pinterest. Whenever I find an idea that inspires me, I either pin it to one of my boards or file it away in my memory (not nearly as reliable).

While my latest inspiration isn't exactly glamorous, it's something that I've needed to do for awhile. I was reading Young House Love the other day (one of my all time favorites) and they did an entry about cleaning out the junk drawer in their kitchen. I'll admit, I thought it was a little silly at first ... a whole post dedicated to cleaning out one drawer? And then I realized that our junk drawer could use a mini-overhaul as well.

The junk drawer in our kitchen is tiny, but we don't have many storage options on our main level. We continued to cram more items into the little space until it got to the point that I had to rearrange the drawer just to shut it. Not cool.

There are several items that I like to keep close by, so I needed a better solution than relocating everything to our basement or continually cramming everything into one tiny drawer.

I started by emptying the drawer in our kitchen and sorting it by category - tape, tools, writing utensils, rubberbands and miscellaneous items.

Once I sorted everything, I pulled out a few items from each category that we tend to use pretty frequently. I put those items back in the drawer -- this time much more organized than the mess we started with.

As for the rest of our supplies, I put them in this glam toolbox that I scored from Home Goods for $6.00. It was originally a photo box, but it just so happened to be the perfect solution to my problem.

All of my leftover "junk" fit so nicely into the compact little container.

The best part about it is that it coordinates perfectly with our sunroom. So well, in fact, that I decided to give it it's own little home on our desk.

I have to say, it's nice to still have everything at arm's reach without overusing our teeny-tiny junk drawer!

How about you guys? Do you have a junk drawer that is getting out of hand? Or do you have a creative way to hide your not so glamorous home supplies? 

I'd love to hear about any other creative storage ideas you have because my next challenge is finding a way to hide my hand weights on the main level. I just scored a great set of 4, 7, 9 and 12 lb. weights from Drew's work for just $8 (total!), so now I need somewhere handy to hide them. I'll let you know what I come up with as soon as I figure it out.