A place for everything
How do you create a junk drawer? Trick question: You don’t.
How do you create a junk drawer? Trick question: You don’t.
Every workspace has a junk drawer – kitchen, studio, woodshop… probably ER rooms, too, but I’d hate to imagine what gets tossed in there. You’re a woodworker so you have at least one. OK, here’s a question. What planning did you put into creating it?
You didn’t, of course. You had something you wanted to stash away and looked for a drawer with enough room to do so, and threw it in. Then you did it again. Then again. Before long, bingo, junk drawer. And once established, Junk Drawer Rules apply.
- As long as you can still close it, never get rid of anything in a junk drawer. You’ll need it as soon as you do.
- If the drawer won’t close and you must dispose of something, logic says to throw out the thing that’s been in there unused the longest. This is a mistake. Throw out whatever was put in most recently.
- Never clean a junk drawer. From time to time a blast of compressed air will get the dust out.
- Find something edible and critters haven’t gotten to it yet? Then the preservatives are doing their work and it’s safe to eat.
- Probably not a good idea to put anything in there that comes in a squeeze tube.
- Occasionally, look for loose change. Somehow, coins always end up in there.
- If you hid an anniversary present in there because you know it’s the last place she’d look, and you find it at some unspecified point much later, you messed up big time pal. Too late to fix this now, so take it back for a refund and buy a new tool.
A.J. Hamler is the former editor of Woodshop News and Woodcraft Magazine. He's currently a freelance woodworking writer/editor, which is another way of stating self-employed. When he's not writing or in the shop, he enjoys science fiction, gourmet cooking and Civil War reenacting, but not at the same time.
