Welcome to week 2 of the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge. Last week, we kicked things off by tackling the clutter under the kitchen sink. This week, we’re getting a little more ambitious. Together, we’ll take on decluttering our kitchen drawers. And yes, this means it’s time to find out what’s lurking in the dreaded junk drawer.

This post was originally published in January 2021 and updated in January 2024.

What is the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge?

In this year-long journey, we’re tackling one task at a time with the goal of cleaning up and organizing our homes. If you’ve just joined us, no worries. You can jump right in with this week’s challenge. Just check out the first two posts in the series to download your free checklists.

• 52-Week Decluttering Challenge
• Week 1 – Easy Decluttering Checklist

Week 2 – Clearing out the kitchen drawers

We’re spending the first few weeks of our challenge in the kitchen, one of the most-used rooms in our homes. It’s also a room with a lot of storage spaces that can easily get cluttered.

For me, clearing out and organizing the kitchen drawers is a big task because we have a lot of drawers in our kitchen. When we renovated our kitchen a few years ago, we replaced some of our cupboards with drawers. From an organization and time-management perspective it was one of the smartest things we’ve ever done. Here’s why:

• It’s so much easier to keep drawers organized because you can actually see everything in the drawer when you open it.
• You save a ton of time because you don’t have to take stuff out of the front of the cupboard to get at the things in the back. 

If you ever do a kitchen renovation, I highly recommend adding more drawers instead of cupboards. If you don’t have an opportunity to do that, you can achieve some of the benefits by using slide out baskets for smaller items in some of your cupboards.

Anyway, back to this week’s task – decluttering our kitchen drawers.

I cleaned out some of my drawers last year, so they weren’t too bad to start with. But there’s always room for improvement, right?

This week’s decluttering and organizing tips

Before we get to what I got rid of, here are my tips and learnings from week two:

• Some duplicates are okay. Ask any decluttering guru and they will tell you to “get rid of duplicates”. I normally agree with that advice. But in the kitchen, it’s okay to have more than one of some commonly-used utensils like spatulas, ladles, and stirring spoons. It’s great to have a clean one at the ready if one is in the dishwasher. And obviously, we all need more than one knife, fork and spoon. But use your judgment. Two spatulas is okay. Ten is probably a bit much.
• Ditch the single-use gadgets. We all have them. Those miracle gadgets that someone convinced us were game changers that would make our lives so much better. I have them too. I used most of them once or twice before they ended up buried in the bottom of a drawer or back of a cupboard. Now is the time to think about whether you really need them. Chances are, you’ll answer no to the first question on our Easy Decluttering Checklist “Did I even know I owned this?”
• Eliminate the junk drawer. Personally, I’ve never had a junk drawer, but I know a lot of people do. It’s an easy place to throw anything and everything. That makes the junk drawer synonymous with clutter. If you have a junk drawer, empty it out, find new homes for the things you want to keep, and get rid of the rest. You’ll have an empty drawer to use for useful things and you won’t waste time searching through the junk drawer for lost items.  

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What I got rid of

Here’s the list of what I got rid of this week.

• Duplicates – Soup ladle, wire whisk, potato peeler, brush, measuring cup, strainer, packable shopping bag, silicone baking mat
• Single use gadgets – wavy vegetable cutter, gadget to hold vegetables while you cut them, spaghetti strainer spoon, mushroom slicer, tomato keeper
• Broken items – plastic measuring cup
• Other things I don’t use – mini skillet, chopsticks, microwave steamer

And, this week’s candidate for the strangest and most useless item is a storage unit that came with some of my plastic containers. It’s supposed to help keep them organized, but I’m using most of the containers elsewhere and it just took up space in the drawer.

Despite the fact that I had done a first round of decluttering last year, I still found 19 items I don’t use and don’t really need.

And here are my before-and-after photos. Looks much cleaner, right?

So that’s a wrap on week two – decluttering our kitchen drawers. Next week, we’ll take another big step in our kitchen decluttering by clearing out the cupboards.

2024 Update

It has been three years so I’m rebooting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge to see how much I can get rid of in 2024.

After a slow start under the kitchen sink last week, I definitely picked up momentum this week. I don’t have a junk drawer, but there was a lot of junk in my kitchen drawers! This week was an important reminder that it’s just so easy to stuff things in a drawer and forget all about them. That’s definitely a habit I’ll be looking to break in 2024.

Here’s the lowdown of what I got rid of this week:

• A bag of pop can tabs. We have been saving these for charity for years, but does anyone still collect them?
• An empty cardboard sleeve from some cleaning cloths I bought a couple of years ago.
• 4 small plastic containers with lids.
• 3 foil pie plates of various sizes.
• 1 Pyrex dish and lid from a set I’ve had since before I was married. It looks brand new. I think it’s a size that I just don’t have any use for.
• 1 stray lid from a plastic container.
• A steamer insert I bought at IKEA and have never used.
• 4 old dishcloths.
• An unused bar towel.
• Decorative wine cork.
• 2 plastic pop can lids.
• 16 assorted kitchen utensils that were duplicates.

In total, I decluttered 36 items from my kitchen drawers—that’s twice as many as in the first round in 2021.

What did you find in your kitchen drawers that you didn’t know you had? Tell us below how decluttering your kitchen drawers went this week.

If you have friends or family members who could benefit from a little less clutter in their lives, please share this post and spread the word!