Every house I’ve lived in has had one in the same two spots: the kitchen drawer closest to the phone charger, or the one under the counter by the back door. Mine currently holds four dead batteries, two takeout menus for restaurants that closed years ago, a tangle of rubber bands, exactly one working pair of scissors buried under a phone case I no longer use, and at least one key I can no longer identify. I’ve dumped it out and “organized” it maybe four separate times over the past two years, and it always slides back into chaos within a few weeks. So when Apartment Therapy gave the junk drawer its own dedicated feature in this year’s Decluttering Cure series — “What Finally Got My Cluttered Junk Drawer Organized,” published September 16, 2026 — I read it hoping for something more durable than another round of dumping everything into a shoebox. A couple of the products below are ones I bought myself after finally doing this properly, and as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on anything purchased through these links.
The Drawer Everyone Has, and Why It Keeps Winning
Apartment Therapy’s Lifestyle Director Stephanie Nguyen built this year’s junk drawer piece around a simple observation: almost nobody decides to make a junk drawer on purpose. It happens gradually, one stray object at a time, until the drawer becomes the default answer to “I don’t know where this goes.” Her method, part of the site’s free 2026 Decluttering Cure program, treats the drawer less like a storage problem and more like a 30-minute triage session — empty it completely, run each item through a short set of questions (do I use this, do I love this, does it belong somewhere else in the house, is it actually trash), and sort everything into temporary outboxes before a single thing goes back in.
It’s Not Really an Organizing Problem
The sharpest point in this year’s junk-drawer coverage didn’t come from Apartment Therapy, though — it came from a separate HGTV roundup of professional organizers published earlier in 2026. Professional organizer Samantha Pregenzer, known online as @simplyorganized, put it bluntly: “Most junk drawer problems aren’t actually organization problems, they’re ‘too much stuff’ problems.” That’s a useful gut check before buying a single divider or bin. A drawer stuffed with three dead pens, four takeout menus, and a phone charger for a phone you don’t own anymore isn’t going to look better in a nicer tray — it needs editing first, the same way a closet or a pantry does. Pregenzer’s other point is just as freeing: “A junk drawer doesn’t need to be beautiful. It needs to be functional… sometimes a few items can share space. The goal is function, not perfection.” That’s permission to stop chasing the kind of color-coded, fully labeled drawer you see online and just get something that works for your own house.
Once you’ve actually thinned the drawer down to things you use, a set of modular dividers makes the difference between it staying organized and sliding back into chaos within a month. Organizer Holly Blakey (@breathing.room.home) recommends sizing the system to the actual space so it can flex as what you keep in there changes. An expandable bamboo drawer divider set adjusts to fit drawers of different widths and depths, which matters more than it sounds like it should — a fixed-size tray that doesn’t quite fit the drawer is often exactly how a “organized” drawer ends up with a gap where loose stuff piles up again.
Sort First, Buy Second
Both the Apartment Therapy and HGTV pieces push back on the instinct to shop before you declutter, which lines up with a broader theme showing up across 2026’s organizing coverage in general: buying containers first usually just hides clutter instead of reducing it. So the actual first move with a junk drawer is Nguyen’s 30-minute process — empty it completely onto a counter, sort into rough piles (keep in this drawer, belongs elsewhere in the house, donate, trash), and only then measure what’s left before shopping for anything. It sounds slower than just grabbing a bin at the store, but it’s the step that keeps the drawer from filling back up with the same stuff six months later.
For the small stuff that’s left after sorting — rubber bands, paper clips, loose coins, the random screws that come with furniture — a set of shallow clear mini organizer trays keeps categories visible without turning the whole project into a labeling exercise. Keeping the trays clear (rather than opaque) means you can actually see what’s running low — out of batteries, out of tape — before you’re digging through the whole drawer to find out.
Keep It From Sliding Back
Blakey’s advice treats the junk drawer as a “high-touch area” that needs a quick reset on a regular basis, not a one-time fix you do once a year during spring cleaning. A drawer you open five times a day accumulates clutter faster than almost anywhere else in the kitchen, which is exactly why the same four batteries and dead pens keep reappearing no matter how many times you’ve cleared it. One trick that actually holds trays and dividers in place inside a drawer that gets opened and slammed shut constantly is a bit of reusable museum gel under each tray corner — it keeps everything from sliding into a jumble every time the drawer closes, without any permanent adhesive.
The HGTV roundup also flags something I’d never have thought to buy for a drawer specifically: a small handheld vacuum for the crumbs, eraser dust, and random grit that collects in the corners no matter how careful you are. A compact handheld vacuum with a crevice nozzle makes the quarterly deep-clean part of the maintenance routine take about ninety seconds instead of a full dump-and-wipe-down, which is honestly the difference between a reset that actually happens and one that keeps getting put off.
What Actually Changed in Mine
I followed Nguyen’s process almost exactly: emptied the whole drawer onto the counter, sorted into four piles, and was honest about the fact that I didn’t need three sets of takeout chopsticks or a phone charger for a phone I replaced two years ago. What went back in was maybe a third of what came out, which is the part that actually matters — the dividers just keep that smaller, edited pile from drifting back into a pile. It’s been six weeks since I reorganized it this time, longer than any of my previous attempts lasted, and the difference isn’t a fancier tray, it’s that there’s finally less in there to go sideways. If your own junk drawer has been through its own four failed “organizing” attempts, the fix probably isn’t a better container — it’s doing the editing part first, and letting the drawer stay a little imperfect once you do.