Ten, ten, ten, ten for everything everything everything everything

[venta]

Recently, someone I was talking to (I forget who) made disparaging comments about someone having a "bloke drawer". I assumed that this was going to refer to, for example, a drawerful of porn. It didn't.

No, they went on, a bloke drawer contains things like spare batteries, and screwdrivers, and string.

I paused, baffled.

What? You mean there are people (of any gender) who don't have at least one drawer like that? Crazy!

The bottom drawer of my desk, which doesn't particularly have a name, contains all those things, plus various oddments of padlocks, elastic bands, scissors, paper clips, gaffer tape, electrical tape, screws... y'know. Useful stuff. It should contain a pair of "81s" (long-nosed pliers, surely the most useful thing ever invented) except my pair has gone missing somewhere. Perhaps they eloped with my Stanley knife, which is also AWOL.

At my parents' house, there is a drawer which fulfills this function which is known as The Everything Drawer. When my parents replaced their dining room furniture, the burning question of the moment was which of the newly-arrived drawers was going to take on the function of being The Everything Drawer. If you need a piece of string or a paper clip, it's that one over there, under the stereo, on the left.

Obviously it doesn't really contain everything - there are many useful things which will not conveniently fit into a drawer, for a start. Like power tools (in the shed), old newspapers (cupboard under the sink) or binbags (cupboard under the stairs). But any thing which is suitably useful, and suitably small, and doesn't seem to have an obvious other home goes into The Everything Drawer.

Do you have a designated location for such small and useful everyday items? Does the location have a name?

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I have a set of boxes like that, on a shelf in a cupboard, because my room contains no drawers, so clearly a shelf needed to be assigned as actually a drawer. Sadly this enabled it to gather more stuff than any drawer should hold, such as bars of soap, pocket $languages[n] dictionaries, a portable iron and all the random remedies.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I seem to have very fixed ideas of where things should be stored. Soap ? Don't be ridiculous, that goes under the bed or in your underwear drawer. Pocket dictionaries ? You can't put books in a drawer, however metaphorical the drawer is. A portable iron ? Yup, sounds like a good place for it. Remedies ? Seems OK, my useful drawer has plasters and Deep Heat and things in it, so I think remedies are fine.

Perhaps I should reconsider some of these non-negotiable rules as it seems they're pretty arbitrary :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the left-hand downstairs drawer by the sink in the house that I grew up in.

The one that was quite hard to shut...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

We have an Everything Drawer, down to the name. Apparently it's not unusual.

Actually, our current Everything Drawer is considerably smaller than our old Everything Drawer at our previous house, so half of our old Everything Drawer is still in the Everything Bag. Not so good.

We also used to have a Good Closet and a Bad Closet, but that's not important now. (The, er, alignment refers to the state of the closet's door rather than a judgment on its contents, boringly enough.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that our house had various other Named Items, but can't think of any of them right now. Good Closet/Bad Closet sounds like exactly the sort of namescheme we'd have gone for, though.

The tools which live in the back of my car live in a rather 60s dark blue holdall which I still refer to as the Thursday Bag. This dates back to me being a small child going to stay with my grandad on a Thursday (while my mum went to work) and all the requisite small-child-caring items being packed into the blue bag.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Er, I have a Useful Tools drawer in the kitchen for screwdrivers and hammers and lightbulbs and tablecloths and a Useful Stuff drawer for stationery and batteries and the like.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm not 100% convinced that a tablecloth constitutes a tool :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I have an everything drawer and at least one everything surface (not necessarily by design).

My bloke drawer, on the other hand, only contains blokes.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I have a crap drawer - that contains things like collapsable tai chi swords and old collectable card games and string....

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Ours is just called 'That Drawer'. As in "A glue gun? Yes, there's one in That Drawer."

[edling.livejournal.com]

We have a plastic storage box that sits on one of our shelves, it's called the Useful Box. Sadly it seems to be unable to contain any pair of scissors for longer than about 5 minutes before they escape again and hide themselves somewhere else.

[edling.livejournal.com]

...forgot to add- my parents have one too, they call it 'The Garage'.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

I don't currently have an Everything Drawer, though there was such a thing in the parental home while I was growing up. Not sure of its nomenclature though.

I do have 4 small drawers on top of my filing cabinet which are: the sharp things drawer, the measuring things drawer, and sticky things drawer and the writing things drawer.

In the kitchen, likewise, I have a sharp things drawer and a non-sharp things drawer.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Isn't the kitchen set-up misbalanced ? Don't you have way more sharp things than you do non-sharp things ?

[metame.livejournal.com]

"The cupboard full of stuff", to add another name.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

I wish it was only the one drawer, house would be less cluttered!

We used to have a "bitbox" at home, which held stationary, spare carkeys, etc...but my house has to deal with "where do we keep the spare flea
collar and spare nametag/latchmagnet" (no, Meg, there will not be further attempts to lose your identity ;), brewing equipment, larp kit...

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Errr....

I appear to have a bloke house. The drawers (what there are of them) are fairly well behaved. But they have no hope of containing the "everything" that has escaped to fill my local space.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I've got several of those, as no individual one is quite big enough. [grin] There's the one in the kitchen, which is currently full of assorted batteries, a battery tester, a charger, and, I think, a wire-and-stud detector. Then there's the tool-tray on one bookcase in the study, which has the bulk of my pliers, screwdriver tips and suchlike. The main driver itself tends to live in the box on another bookcase with the assorted PC mounting screws. I could centralise it all, but I tend to need the tools in the study, and the batteries are mostly for my walkman and camera flashes, which tend to get sorted out in the living room ...

Actually, I do really need to sort out that kind of thing - various items tend to end up bookshelves, and therefore cannot be found until a replacement is bought (according to the law of D'oh!)

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

I have a stationery drawer, which contains not only every bit of useful and more obscure bits of stationery in existence (hole punches and liquid paper aren't high on my list of things I need these days), but pins, packing tape, gaffa tape, screwdrivers, string, etc. Batteries do live in a different drawer, not entirely sure why. Possibly because it's a right bugger to find anything small in my stationery drawer (which is now actually a stationery box that lives under my desk).

[triskellian]

We have an Everything House :-(

(Also, is anyone else noticing the word 'drawer' starting to disintegrate on repeated readings?)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Of course. Someone without such a thing is going to be one of those decorative types that aren't any use, surely?

We have a Shed Cache. It's actually the cupboard under the stairs and should have a LRU relationship with the garage. It doesn't seem to work, though.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, the trouble with that is that you need some sort of cron to actually move stuff. Drawers are naturally LRU, as things sile to the back/bottom. Or over the back and into the bowels of the chest (to mix an anatomical metaphor cocktail).

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

I have three tool boxes in assorted sizes and a screws/nails sorting arrangement of many small drawers.

[venta.livejournal.com]

If the tool boxes contain only tools, I reckon that doesn't count - to be an Everything Drawer it has to be peculiarly miscellaneous :)

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

We have a "useful draw", cause all the stuff in it is useful, i.e. duct-tape, dusters, lighters, spare keys etc. :)

you can all just kiss off into the air

[paste.livejournal.com]

when i was little we had a Scissor Drawer in the kitchen, presumably because that was the main thing us kids always wanted out of it. but even better is the Back Cupboard which is a walk-in treasure trove of everything you could think of needing/wanting. i love going in there when i visit home, if you dig far enough back you find all sorts of amazing stuff.

in my house now we have a Crap Drawer in the kitchen, and i have a Useful Stuff cubbyhole in my shelving unit. it's getting too full, things keep falling out of it in a distressingly noisy way!

Re: you can all just kiss off into the air

[venta.livejournal.com]

You win one kudo for your subject line ;)

There is something terribly exciting abuot a large cupboard full of useful stuff (in the same way stationery cupboards are exciting).

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

We have the 'shelf of all things' which is a combo of useful stuff as you've described, our ghetto blaster (sorry to secretrebel but that's what my subconcious calls it), plus anything where we can't work out where to put or that we'll be needing again shortly.

It's usually extremely full !

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

We keep all that stuff in the "Useless Cupboard." It was a short free standing Ikea cupboard in the UK, but now it's a shelf in the built-in linen cupboard in the hall.

I've just had to check the etymology with rabbit1080, who has reminded me that we called it that because we can never find anything in it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The phrase "the Useless Cupboard" to refer to an Ikea cupboard sounds very familiar; I wonder if you (or Mrs Rabbit) told me about it, or whether someone else independently uses the same terms.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

We have one, it's called "the second drawer down". Now, this name may not seem anything more than descriptive, because in one house, possibly the one we first lived in after we married, it was indeed the second drawer down.
However, in each place since then, it has kept the name, even though the location of the junk drawer does not fit the name any longer.
Similarly, before we were married, Viv was at my parents' house when something was mentioned, and Viv was told she could get one from the orange dresser in the morning room. She returned, unable to identify the orange dresser. It was, of course, painted white. It had been orange once, so that was its name. Just painting something white doesn't change its name, does it? I mean, I'm still Ian whether I'm wearing a hat or not.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Indeed, things in our house accrue names and don't necessarily lose them when they cease to be appropriate. See also pubs, shops, and people who change their name on marriage.

When I was at junior school, a teacher (perhaps doing a sly social survey) enquired of everyone what their household called the room in which one sits about. Various people answered living room, lounge, front room, etc. I answered "dining room", and was sharply reprimanded that that was a room where you ate, not where you sat about.

I was most aggrieved. The room in our house (containing a dining table and some easy chairs), in which we spent most time, was (and still is) known as the dining room.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

What we don't have any more is the "emergency cabinet" which was a ... good idea :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

It was... though it was really only ever any use in a very limited set of emergencies. More of a 'two things drawer' than an everything drawer :)

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Not right now, but only because of my nomadic lifestyle. But yes, in every place I've lived previously.

[taimatsu]

I have a Useful Drawer, as of three years ago-ish. It's the third drawer down in my desk. It contains batteries, sellotape, electrical tape, duct tape (when I have any), string (when I have any), torches, screwdrivers, small umbrellas, battery chargers, superglue, other kinds of glue, sandpaper, a sticky lint-roller, curtain hooks, a hammer, an odour neutraliser spray, a spare deodorant spray, an adjustable spanner, two lightbulbs, a bleepy keyring, bubble solution, balloons, a big four-part container of nails, matches, two pairs of secateurs, a digital kitchen timer, some Miffy stickers, an old cat-shaped keyring, some clothespegs, a metal ruler, a set of protractors and rulers and things, a tape-measure, and (temporarily) an old mobile phone and some spare SIM card packs. The Miffy stickers should actually be in the next drawer down, which is Stationery.

Knives do not live in this drawer - I have assorted Stanley knives and craft scalpels, which live, along with all my smaller pliers and various other stuff, in the 'Tools' drawer of my jewellery-making container (a set of six wooden drawers from IKEA). My binbags are also under the sink.

I have a box in the bathroom for medical stuff, of which I have quite a bit thanks to a major oversupply of dressings for my scalds from some years ago (what can I do with loads of JELONET dressings? They will be binned if I give them to a pharmacy as I believe I ought). Soap goes in the other bathroom box. Scissors OUGHT to be in the Useful Drawer but aren't.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You useful drawer does sound remarkably similar to mine in constitution. I emptied mine out last night and found all kinds of things hanging about at the bottom. Like a puncture repair kit, and lots of unused twist-closers, and spare buttons, and some shoelaces, and...

I should have added in my original post that I also have a stationery drawer, and a tool box, and they're completely different animals. Anything too carefully categorised clearly doesn't count :)