52 Weeks of decluttering - #16 Getting those drawers under control

I lucked out again - the area I had planned to attack is the one featured in this week's prompt @ organizing junkie!

There is very little in the way of drawer space in our 70s kitchen, just five tiny drawers. I really hadn't organised them for quite some time and had come to realise my previous system was no longer working as effectively. So time to do over! I only remembered to take one before photo, so you'll need to use your imagination! I my sights were the cutlery and utensil drawers.

Half-way through emptying the plastics drawer

The system I had in place was two utensils drawers - one labelled Metal Only, the other Plastic Only. While this was, in fact, working with our cleaner and the family, the result was too easy for everyone to just dump and run, which meant there was stuff in there we didn't need.

Such as half a dozen swirly straws my 23yo married daughter who has lived out of home almost two years admitted were hers! (She happened to be visiting when the project was tackled, so was co-opted to help!)

We had been shopping at Howard's Storage World earlier, as I wanted a new cutlery insert and other containers for the project. I found just the right cutlery insert:

Nice and simple

And was able to reuse the old one in one of the utensil drawers:

I was fed-up with sliding the top tray at every meal time.

Apart from wondering why we own so many chopsticks, I worked out that this insert was just right for some things but others needed something different. We were heading to Ikea the next day, so my mission was to find the right containers. Sadly, all the Ikea ones are designed for huge drawers and were no good to me, so we ended up at a different Howard's Storage and I was able to work out just what I needed and which sizes best fit the space, resulting in this arrangement:

Much more control

I got rid of a heap of duplicates (elder daughter is also planning on setting up her own home soon!) and got rid of the useless (6 kiwi fruit spoons???) And I am mostly happy with what is left. 

We did decide to keep the fork from the set of baby cutlery - we are sentimental like that ;)