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.)

[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.

[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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[metame.livejournal.com]

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

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

No, indeed, but it's a handy drawer for putting table cloths in :-).

Shame they don't fit :-(.

[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 :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

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