When I was a kid, I used to play Barrel of Monkeys, a game where you stick your hand in a plastic barrel and pull out a string of as many linked plastic monkeys as possible. Until recently, this game sprang to mind every time I fished a utensil out of my kitchen drawer: The whisk’s connected to the spatula, which is connected to the egg beater, the tongs, a garlic press and a charger from a cellphone long ago retired.
“How long are you going to put up with that?” my husband, Dan, asks, watching this.
“Show me a woman with a tidy, well-organized kitchen drawer, and I will show you a woman who has too much time on her hands,” I say as I shake loose a sea-serpent chain of utensils, sending a meat fork flying Freudian-like toward Dan.
“Hey!” he wails, then dodges. “I was just saying. …”
“I know what you’re saying. And I’m saying if you want a woman who never has a chip in her nail polish, who shows up to dinner parties with homemade peanut brittle and whose drawers are clean, you didn’t marry one.”
“All righty then.” He hands me the meat fork and makes for the door. Deep down I know the truth. I’m out of control and need professional help. So I called Barry Izsak, president of the National Association of Professional Organizers (now there’s a barrel-of-fun group) and owner of Arranging It All, based in Austin, Texas. “People call me when they’ve reached a point of pain,” he says. While my tipping point was the tangled drawer, for others it’s a lost tax refund, or finding out you sent your pap-smear results to school in your kid’s lunch-money envelope.
Izsak and I got right down to business and discussed my drawer problem. He then sent me straight to The Container Store for drawer dividers. I went reluctantly. But when I realized I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life rummaging for the potato peeler, I started to come around. I ran the numbers: An organized kitchen drawer could save on average 30 seconds a day, or three hours a year, time I could put to good use combating unwanted body hair. I was sold.
Once I entered the mother of all storage stores, I caught organizing fever. I not only bought dividers for my utensil drawer, but also for my knife, junk, bathroom and jewelry drawers. I returned home on a mission. I started emptying drawers all over the house. Never mind that it was dinnertime, as my family kept reminding me. Dinner could wait. I was changing my life.
I started with the utensil drawer, separating spatulas, peelers and presses. Then I moved to knives, which had fought so long in their dividerless drawer that the blades were dull as tennis shoes. I wrestled open the junk drawer. “You can have a junk drawer,” says Izsak, “just as long is it’s organized.”
“Organized junk drawer” sounds like an oxymoron, but he’s the expert. I sorted batteries, shoe polish, screwdrivers, my high school student ID, an extracted molar, extension cords and fish gravel into three piles: weird stuff, weirder stuff, super-weird stuff. When I moved to the jewelry drawer, both daughters had their hands out.
The process was cathartic and felt good the way a leg wax feels good. Afterward, I spent the night wandering among the drawers, opening and closing them feeling deeply self-satisfied, like how you would feel if you had your oil changed, teeth cleaned and 100 viruses purged from your computer in the same day. And I learned this: You can have creditors after you, sky-high cholesterol, kids on drugs, and a marriage as volatile as a live grenade, but clean, orderly drawers will make you feel utterly in control.
Marni Jameson is a nationally syndicated columnist who lives in the Denver area. You may contact her through marnijameson.com.
Izsak offers tips for taking control of your kitchen
Keep counters clear for a less cluttered look and more work space. OK, you can have a coffee maker out if you use it daily, but put the toaster and blender in a cupboard. Appliances used twice a year – that bread machine – could go on a top shelf or in the garage. And, seriously, that pasta maker?
Put items you use often next to where you use them. For instance, keep dishes and silverware in the cupboard and drawer between the dishwasher and the table. Pitchers can go on a top shelf, and party platters in a more remote area.
Maximize wall space with open shelving or a baker’s rack. Store decorative cookware, folded dish towels and cookbooks there.
Don’t fall for glass-front cabinets. Most of the stuff we put in cupboards just isn’t that hot to look at.
Keep it up. “Maintenance is the key,” says Izsak. “I can create the best system for you in the world, but you have to stick to it.”
Join me next week as Izsak helps us tackle Dan’s home office.
