My wife says every family has this drawer. I do not believe every family has this drawer. Do you have this drawer? Do you know a good solution to this drawer?
We have a silverware drawer, organized, maxed out. A sharps drawer, organized, maxed out. Ziplocs, organized, maxed out. Bbq tools and oven mitts, organized, maxed out. But all this shit has no particular category so fuck me right. I gotta have an awkward necessary crap drawer. Maybe I should post all my drawers and crowdsource me some sense into my kitchen.
This drawer is the solution. To everything…
You’ve lost this one, and if this was a hill you were prepared to die on I would get ready to lose a lot more.
Throw in birthday candles, rubber bands, and a few coins and you got yourself a proper junk drawer.
Don’t forget the batteries which may or may not have a charge. If you want to modernize it, it should also have some wall warts and USB cables.
Everyone has this drawer, but this one is too organized. It appears to be 100% kitchen tools. You need to add a deck of playing cards, a bunch of soy sauce packets, a few half-used books of matches, a few take-out menus, and some loose keys in order to do this drawer properly.
Don’t forget tangled wired headphones, rubber bands, a single battery, loose change, and unevenly folded napkins you’ll never use!
Nah, that’s the junk drawer. This one is all the random kitchen tools drawer. Ladles, can openers, spatulas, meat thermometers, wooden spoons, etc. this and the junk drawer are two different drawers
“the junk drawer” is just too damn real.
It’s the miscellaneous utensil drawer. We have 2. Up top for common ones like can opener, corkscrew… big one on floor for the lesser used ones like rolling pin, flour sifter, hand mixer…
If you are arguing over this, don’t. Not worth it because there’s no better answer unless you have a millionaire mansion with a gazillion drawers
Remove the scale, electronics don’t belong in the misc food prep and niche baking implements drawer. Once you do that you’ll easily recognize it as the food prep and niche baking implements drawer. The scale goes on a shelf, or in a cabinet next to the mixer/food proc/salad spinner.
I agree but if it’s a small kitchen, I wouldn’t call the scale out of place.
Yes, every household in the developed world has a drawer like this. It’s for things that you hardly need or never need, but might do, one day, probably (not).
Why it bothers me: in a more sane world, this stuff would be shared. Every community would have a junk tool shed - not every household of 4 people, or 2 people, or (increasingly) one person. It’s reminiscent of that drill statistic: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its lifetime. This is madness. Our planet is overflowing with junk. As a species we need to be smarter.
the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its lifetime.
This smells like a fact pulled from someone’s ass. This article thinks so too.
Supposedly, supposedly. There were lots of links in Steffen’s post, but no source was provided for the assertion that the average power drill is used for a total of just six to twenty minutes during its lifetime. (I find the numbers highly suspicious. I wrote to Steffen asking for his source, but haven’t heard back.)
I use drills everyday for work and have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.
Transaction costs, in this context, might also be called pain-in-the-butt costs, and pain-in-the-butt costs don’t have to get very high before you say, “Screw it, I’m buying a drill.” You accept, even welcome, low levels of utilization in order to avoid onerous transaction costs. And, yes, you are being totally rational. Utilization isn’t everything.
Sure, it’s a factoid. Maybe it’s 20 minutes. But we all know it’s very low. Seven minutes is an overestimate for my drill.
have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.
Yes, and it’s a problem. The possibility of borrowing one from your neighbor is passed over entirely and the alternative is to drive to get another one already in your possession.
All of this is completely unsustainable behavior at the scale of the planet. I suppose you’ll get in a huff and take this personally but I really am talking about all of us. As I said, I have a drill myself and bought it for exactly the reasons you cited. I just think we could all do better.
But the transaction cost of borrowing my neighbors is much higher. I have to talk to him for 20 minutes, he has to find it, it’s not charged, it’s a piece of crap and the Chuck doesn’t work. An hour process for a 10 second job to hang the shelf.
I think a drill is a terrible tool to use as an example since it’s used for many purposes and almost any household chore. A better tool would be a Sawzall, it’s built for a niche tasks and can be essential for that one cut. I will absolutely have a chat with the neighbor to avoid trying to make a cut with a hand held hacksaw blade trying to cut a stud in half. I use it so infrequently I absolutely don’t need my own.
But an awful lot of households do have electric drills and apparently the average one gets less use than yours. Mine certainly does. Whatever the exact number of minutes-per-lifetime, you’re gonna have difficulty persuading me that every single household of all the 8 billion people on earth needs its own electric drill and that there’s not a better way of organizing things.
And that’s my whole point: America’s hyper-consumerist comfort-oriented lifestyle, where everyone has a closet overflowing with semi-useless junk, where talking to one’s neighbor is a waste of precious time, is just not a realistic goal for a sustainable civilization. Nor even particularly desirable, I’d say. Again: please don’t take this personally, I’m criticizing a whole system and I too have an electric drill (though not a Sawzall, whatever that is).
Every household has a stove. Isn’t a communal oven where we all bring our dough a more environmentally ethical choice? My neighborhood has a laundromat but I have a washer and dryer. Is that selfish? Personally I’d love a communal heating system, I hate dealing with my furnace.
I take no offense to the conversation, but I think putting a stigma on drill ownership is quite low on the Social Irresponsibility Index.
This is partly a US-vs-rest-of-world cultural misunderstanding. Here in Europe housing units are much smaller than in the USA, people live on top of each other and many of the things you mention are already shared. And it’s not actually a problem for everyone. In Sweden, for example, even middle-class people live in apartment buildings with collective heating.
I guess you’ll say that, at heart, deep down, Europeans really want to be Americans and live in suburban castles and drive and share nothing, and maybe you are even right. But whether we want it or not, that is not a sustainable solution for humanity. An electric drill being used for 5-20 minutes in its lifetime is, I continue to believe, a very decent microcosm of the whole problem.
You think I say a lot of things.
I agree, we own many things that we should borrow. I disagree that electric drills are the worst offenders. I wish my small town had a lending library. I would gladly use it. But I would still keep a drill at home, even though I have 3 at work.
I’m guessing that 6-20 minutes is like the actual time spent driving screws or drilling holes. Each one takes maybe a few seconds. 6-20 minutes in that case translates to hundreds of screws driven, even on the low end. So not nearly as worthless as the time makes it sound.
How do people do without an electric drill? Why don’t they use it?!
In fairness 7 minutes with an electric drill will get you a lot of holes!
The problem is that it’s an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Most drills sit unplugged virtually the whole time. If we could only find a way to share them, we could have the same number of holes for a tiny fraction of the resources and the pollution. And as a bonus it might even strengthen local communities, which would be another obvious win. IMO the electric drill shows the dysfunction of consumer capitalism in microcosm.
IMO the electric drill shows the dysfunction of consumer capitalism in microcosm.
You’re correct, but it’s a fractal. It’s drills all the way down.
These misc drawers are the best way to worship anoia, Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers (also luck).
And a slight odour of cigarette smoke …
A junk/misc. drawer? Yes.
Every family afaik has at least one of these drawers. Just accept it and live your life.
The “junk drawer” is supposed to have old receipts, loose batteries, the toy(s) you took from your kid when they threw it at your head, some vaguely kitchen-esque looking tool you got as a wedding gift but don’t know what it is…crap like that.
That’s just a normal large/specialty utensil drawer.
Oh we have like 2 of these easy but the junk drawer is for things that don’t touch food
So you have two junk drawers and this drawer. Welcome to the club my friend.
Every house has one.
Not to brag but I have two of these and a proper junk drawer.
Ours is a little more organized with dividers, but it doesn’t look much better. Everyone I know has a drawer like that. I’d take the scale out and put it on a shelf. Scales are delicate.
PS, we have the exact same can opener, pizza roller, and grater as you guys.
This is not a junk drawer, there are no coins or condiment packets.
This looks to be a kitchen accessories drawer although I’m unsure why you have a pill cutter in there.
