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

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

We own too much useful stuff to fit into an Everything Drawer, so have an Everything House instead.

There is a Batteries & Random Cables Drawer.

There is a Stuff To Do With Paper Drawer with scissors, paper clips, staplers, etc.

There is a DIY cupboard with screws, electrical tape, gaffa tape, hand tools, power tools, etc.

There is a Toy Soldiers desk with pin vice, wires, plasticard, plastic glue, superglue, expensive Japanese 0.1mm permanent markers, paints, brushes, plastic snips, needle files, craft knives, bradawls, hacksaws, etc.

There is a Sewing Desk with rivet setters, tin snips, small hammers, Stanley knives, sewing machines, overlockers, etc.

There is a Work Shed with bowmaking kit, leatherworking kit, metalworking kit (including a drill stand and a sheet metal cutter), armouring kit, chainsaw, angle grinder, sledgehammer, splitting maul, felling axe, etc.

Then there's the loft, which has Useful Raw Materials That Will Come In Handy Someday, like foam & leather in various densities & thicknesses, toys that will someday be converted into LRP kit, etc.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That's clearly not an Everything House! The principle of Everythingness is stuff all bundled in together - yours sounds positively organised, ordered, and neatly filed!

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

Oh, how wonderful if that were true! The former library assistant in me would delight in such order. Sadly there are craft knives in almost all those different places, and power tools in several of them, and I am never sure whether to keep large files with the toy soldiers (where they will be most commonly used) or in the DIY cupboard (with the hand tools, where they strictly belong), and there are several other multi-purpose hand tools that could be filed in almost any of the aforementioned places, and if I want to do leatherworking I probably have to get the leatherworking tools from the shed, some stuff from the sewing desk, AND some leather from the loft...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

But that's just The Useful Drawer! I thought everyone had one of those.

Traditionally it's the drawer below the cutlery and utensils drawers in the kitchen, but in my current flat it's the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Goodness me, I'd never look for the useful drawer in the kitchen. What a strange idea :)

I have noticed over the years, though, that there is a very definite convention in kitchens about where the cutlery drawer is. I reckon that in any unfamiliar kitchen, a visitor would hit the cutlery drawer right first time. (Sometimes it's obvious because there's very few contenders, but even in kitchens with lots of drawers there's a clear Obvious Choice.)

New flat (into which I am moving) caused mild panic initially, because it appears to have no drawers in the kitchen at all. Fortunately some were located in a unit which was pretending to be a cupboard.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Ours is a String Draw, and it's something that Darrell's family had, and mine didn't. It's next to the miscellaneous draw with all the cold remedies, ibuprofen etc in it.

My family may not have had one of these because my dad used to be Merchant Navy (captain of BP oil tankers) and if it wasn't in one of the kids bedrooms, it had a Place. Commonly remembered as 'A Place for everything, and everything in it's Place' So far too organised to count as an 'Everything' anything...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Almost all the drawers in our house are bloke drawers by that definition, because to me gathering miscellaneous and unsorted stuff is the default purpose of drawers. I think out of the 30 or so drawers that we have, there are only half a dozen or so that actually have a defined storage function. All the others just hold whatever random probably-useful gribble they happened to be handy for at the last time of tidying.

This can make it very laborious trying to find sellotape and so on.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Michael McIntyre has a great sketch about the "Man Drawer":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qyJpAn2Wc

[venta.livejournal.com]

I was just getting ready to be all offended about the idea that I shouldn't be allowed in the loft, when I remembered that this morning I had a real struggle getting a microwave out of our attic (they're heavy, you know) and wished hendybear was there to do it for me!

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

:-)

The "loft" part of that sketch leads into the "Man Drawer" part. Being nerdy, my "Man Drawer" is mostly electronic - indeed, the folder is named "Man Drawer"! I availed myself of a document scanner and now all my instruction manuals, receipts, bank statements (going back to 1977!) etc are in electronic form and I don't have boxes full of this stuff any more. I haven't scanned all the takeaway menus though - we still have a non-virtual Man Drawer for some things ...

[venta.livejournal.com]

You may wish to swap notes with wimble, who I believe has been embarking on his own document-scanning programme of late :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

The 'man drawer' part was funny, I'm just still confused by the idea that it's a man thing. I thought it was a person thing!

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Fujusti ScanSnap s1500, which is a double sided, sheet-fed scanner, which comes with sufficiently smart OCR software that it can detect (and correct) inverted pages. The downside is that it's entirely proprietary drivers, and the functionality can't therefore be extended eg. it can't separate multiple documents into separate files: they either need to be scanned separately, or chopped apart manually afterward.

And KnowledgeTree, which is an opensource (and free) document management system. I'm not scanning my manuals (because I can't be bothered dismantling them into separate pages), but am installing the online PDFs.

Scanning menus has, in fact, turned out to be useful, as I can sit on the sofa in other people's houses and fetch my up-to-date copy of their old menus (as well as, obviously) not scattering the hardcopy around my house!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'd like to point out to any other readers that not only can he browse these takeaway menus from others' sofas, he does ;)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I wasn't pointing out that it was your man drawer that was broken.
Well, I suppose, obsolete menus are exactly what are supposed to be in there. So, in that sense, it was working. But if it had been working properly, you'd have have a series of obsolete menus, so you could track the prices rises. And the current menu.

Missing the last one was a bit of a failure.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Respect! I'm using a Samsung multi-function device with ADF - but it doesn't handle double sided documents. pdftk is your friend for combining and splitting PDFs; I also use it with a script I produced to interleave pages (that is, for double-sided docs I scan all the page fronts and backs separately then combine the two scans into one).

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I'm (currently) using the (supplied) ScanSnap Manager for chopping the PDFs around, as it allows page rotation, and cutting and pasting of pages (so deletion, and document splitting).

I'm not yet using pdftk, although a quick google links it to iText in Action, which is sitting on my desk (in hardcopy, not electronic ;) I had to write some java stuff for merging PDFs at work, so I just carried on with that. It's entirely plausible that the toolkit actually does what I really need!

I have a stuff drawer and an unnamed box

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

Plus scattered things in attics and under stairs. Never thought to call it a bloke drawer and the idea doesn't appeal.

First aid stuff is in one of my many toiletries boxes.

[ebee.livejournal.com]

There is a mike Mackintire sketch about this on you tube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4xxqVzlSeE

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

You forgot the "office cupboard" which hasn't strictly been that for nigh on two years but, in spite of a grand clearout when I retired, still looks full of miscellaneous grot. Good source of anything you want to know on consumer law however!