In 1980 we moved to a junk house as almost nothing had been removed by the previous owners; this junk has been added to over the years.
My childhood home had an old oak 'country-made' desk used on the Friday of each week by my father to work out the wages for his employees. After much grunting, under the breath swearing, checking of Inland Revenue tax forms and calculations on the back of envelopes, wads of notes and coins were put into wage packets to be delivered to 'the men' before a lunch-time half at the pub.
This desk contained, within the top door, a vast array of useless bits and pieces all fascinating to a small child.
I remember cigarette cases, bunches of keys, odd playing cards, dud lighters, padlocks, pencil stubs, bent-nibbed fountain pens and dozens of red kidney bean seeds, totally dry and lifeless. Over this mix of detritus hung a metallic smell that stuck in the back of the throat.

I am constantly - well sometime - at war with my drawers - (both sorts - up and down in sizes!) - I get them rationalized and organised and in perfect order UNTIL I want a paper from the paper drawer, some medication from that drawer (getting fuller by the minute), a ring, a pen, a nail file etc. all from appropriately organised drawers but when I open them everything is in disarray again - left to the last minute I have rumbled through them for some essenial iten OR perhaps the Lollocks have taken a special interest in me - I think its the lollocks - Oh for tidy (and smaller)drawers

Lollocks extract (R Graves)

By sloth on sorrow fathered,
These dusty-featured Lollocks
Have their nativity in all disordered
Backs of cupboard drawers.

They play hide and seek
Among collars and novels
And empty medicine bottles,
And letters from abroad
That never will be answered.

Jankin........LOL......"smaller drawers"....yes I wish for that everytime I step on the scales!!

Several. But worse are the junk shelves...like the one in the linen closet...with boxes of photos, cleaning supplies, a tackle box full of game pieces, vacuum attachments, rags, and anything that won't fit on the other shelves. The night stand drawer and the closed compartment in the bottom of it...nightmare stuff!

And why is it that I keep washing the raggy taggy towels and face cloths so that I then feel obligated to use them again as they have been washed and dried?

Bottom drawer in the kitchen, of course. Contains some kitchen utensils that are seldom used and are derided by DH as useless (but they're not), as well as glue both new and dried up, WD-40, a box of crayons, slightly used birthday number candles, screw drivers, note pads, and other necessary "stuff."

Yes, but it's been the "dammit" drawer as in "Dammit, I know it's in here somewhere!" It's actually become rather organized with a hammer, pliers, screwdriver (with a reversible bit for flathead or Philipshead), pens,pencils, boxcutter, fishing line, several sizes of batteries, note pads, steel tape, magic marker, masking tape, and some things that really don't belong there and I can't remember what they are right now!!!!!

Yes, several. And I do organize them beautifully from time to time. But they never stay orderly, even with drawer organizers, and insist in going back to their natural state.

All mine are junk drawers.

I have a number of junk drawers. Every now and then I remove anything that's not useful and put it in a box. I am sure the box will be very interesting to the archaeologists of the future.

I have one main junk drawer and try as I might to keep it organized, it keep reverting, as Rosefolly said, to its natural state. It has things like Father Christmas cheese spreaders (like I ever use those!), and a Dennis the Menace nail brush and some wooden skewers and things like that. Useful, but only once in a thousand years. But too useful to throw away!

I have what is called over here a chiffonier but I find that Webster calls it an escritoire. It's a tall chest of drawers with three large drawers below and a number of small drawers at the top and a writing shelf between that can be put up and locked to cover the smaller drawers. Very convenient with small grandchildren around. The contents are very much like yoyobon's, leftovers from several generations of children. The oldest stuff is from my husband's childhood. I meant to sort the junk and organise it later this year but perhaps it's a pity to ruin the fascination of the incredible mix of things and trinkets for the children. Games, a wooden Solitaire board with glass marbles, souvenir packs of cards (California redwood trees and Shakespeare's flowers), chess board and pieces in stone from Kenya, a gift from my daughter's first boyfriend, photos and postcards, including my husband's collection of the postcards his widowed mother sent him every week when she was away at university for two years, leaving him with her parents. My mother's mother-of-pearl cigarette case (an almost obscene object now when nobody smokes), a large number of things the children made in kindergarten, coins from every country we've visited, odd but beautiful buttons, old toys and souvenirs, a cloth bag with very small keys, part of my book mark collection and hundreds of other things.

I spent most of the spring and summer of 2008 cleaning out my parents' very large house, in which they had lived since I was 6 (over 40 years is all I am going to say) They are now living in a small apartment in a retirement community-their square footage went down by 7/8.
I am now on a mission-to not put our children through that. It was horrifying to all of us-my mother accused us more than once of "throwing away her life" (old homemade vhs tapes) and "not valuing things" such as the 7 broken telephones we found in one cupboard. I don't want that. So each week I try to rationally purge a little more, either throwing, giving, or consigning things that we no longer need. It is an uphill battle, I admit. I was raised by two Depression-era babies-they threw away NOTHING!

marianese......oh, your escritoire would be the beginning of a very wonderful children's story!
I am so enchanted by the contents that I wish I could be there to have a treasure hunt!!

Yvonne

cc - exactly why we have started purging our house. We cleaned out my in-laws' house after they died. Not knowing whose baby shoe that was, or if it was left by the previous owner, made it a meaningless "treasure" to hold onto. And trying to find someone to tag sale it, we just didn't have enough "good" junk. Then, my mother was dying last fall - and wanted to see each of us to give us things she wanted to make sure got to the right person - did I really want the tin bracelet her HS beau gave her...no! And then, after she died, my sister had to go through her stuff and send everything to the person my mother had marked it for. Too many things that I had never seen before, or heard of, and that were meaningless to me. So - we are boxing things for the child they belonged to...giving them now - they can toss or keep. Lots of stuff for the church flea market and the trash collector. Now - the books...............

My nightmare too - that when I die (and hopefully not for a long time yet) that I have a load of junk that no one wants. When my dad died a few years, my mum did a Herculaen job of cleaning out a Victorian 8-bedroom house full of antiques and books, and moving into a small three bedroom row house one street over. We are so lucky that my mum is not one to hoard things so things will be easy to sort out when the worst occurs and my mum dies.

I am trying to get that sort of "sorted out" level in my life, but the books! I know they are important to me, but to other people - nope.

I have willed the things that were my mother's to my daughter who wants them and have told her and my two stepdaughters that I don't care what they do with my stuff but to please get the good things valued before they put them in a yard sale. And, yes, the books!