Junk Drawer no more!

When I finally hit my breaking point and decided to beat my family into submission start the Great Organization of 2011 I wanted to take the house by storm and change everything before the end of April.  When I woke up I knew that wasn't the best planning.  This is going to be a big change for the kids and an even bigger change for my husband.  If I try to do it all at once, or worse if I tried to do it all alone, I don't think it would stick.

I've spent the last year focused on losing weight.  I've lost 60 pounds so far and see my goal within my reach.  The hardest thing I've learned is slow and steady progress is the only way to lose the weight and keep it off.  It's something I still struggle with daily.  I'm all about The Biggest Loser numbers rather than 1 -2 pounds a week.  

Along those lines, I took a few days to come up with a plan.  Since we both work full time and commute almost an hour each way to work and our kids are both active in sports or scouts I knew I had to keep it reasonable.  I decided I needed to start with storage spaces.  The single biggest pet peeve in my kitchen is the "junk drawer".  It's something I've not had in any other home, but we have so many drawers in this kitchen it seemed like a good idea.  Six years ago anyway!

The funniest part about this project was the amount of "help" I had.  Generally when I start to clean, all 3 of them run for the hills.  When they heard me start going through the drawer my husband was instantly in there, followed closely by my daughter.  I'm sure my husband was afraid I'd throw away a treasure if he wasn't there to claim it.

I'm not even sure that I was able to pull the drawer completely out.  I had NO clue what all was hidden in here because I hated to even open the drawer!

Thanks to the help from my husband I made quick work of this.  Much of it was junk and went straight into the garbage.  At least 1/4 of it was screw drivers and tools that needed to go into the cave {aka the garage}.  

Another 1/4 was pencils, pens and markers.  Good grief!  There were also 2 pencil sharpeners that none of us knew we had.  Its always a struggle to get homework done because they can't find a sharpened pencil.  A side project from this will be a Homework Box.  

I found at least 100 candles.  How many birthday cakes will we need to have use all of those? (not all pictured haha).  Anyone care for a glitter covered gum ball?  

There are no words.

This is all that went back into the drawer.  Actually it went in, they were crammed in a cabinet before.  Everything else in the drawer went to its rightful home.  

Do you have a junk drawer?  Is it out of control? Or do you have organized chaos?