Organizing with Free Stuff

At long last I'm finally back to post the 4th in the series of 'special' areas in my kitchen that were just a wee bit out of control. I did the work and have been pretty happy with the results over the last couple of weeks.  Getting to the post however has proved a little more of a challenge.  I've had a couple of things going on in October.  

Here's what we are starting with: 

Contained in this drawer are the grocery bags that I save.  Plenty of leftover cell phones, chargers, aircards (ie internet access), SD cards, SIM cards, digital cameras of unknown origins, old fashioned telephone directories (remember those that are printed on paper???), and plenty of other special things that made their way into this drawer.

These are all the phones, chargers and holsters I appropriately recycled.  Turns out I should have held on to one of the chargers.  I'll have to search for a spare, for now I've taken the one I keep packed in my suitcase.

Next up, yep you guessed it.  These were buried at the bottom of the drawer.  We moved here in 2001 and this 98-99 directory was already a little on the old side, but you can see we didn't mind writing a note on the cover to ourselves with an update.  The pink page was C & S's emergency contact list when they stayed at home alone.  There were phone numbers so old on there... well it was comical.  

In fact only L & I had cell phones at the time.

Don't miss the Easter card from 2001 from Tia Tia in the background that I saved, because it had a nice and thoughtful note written inside, but since most of the people had moved from the 98-99 directory, I recycled it.

Then there is the 1984 old school rainbow directory.  I've been writing in pencil all these years so as people move or change their phone number I could easily update it.  I bought this at Michael's on clearance.  I'd say at this point it was money well spent.  On the inside cover I have our neighbors phone numbers listed in the order their houses are on the street. That's proven helpful several times.

Finally the old sandwich bag boxes.

One is for grocery bags and the other for extra produce bags.  Those are the two I'm most likely to use, but I don't use a lot of them.  So when the boxes are full I get rid of all the extra bags I bring home.  I rarely remember to take my reusable bags into the store, so I do bring home extra plastic bags.  Of course I never let them pack the meat in the reusable ones because ewwww, that's icky.

So the clean drawer has the chargers that we need for everything we still own and use, scotch tape for taping recipes into my cookbook binder, two spare phones (one was just placed into service this evening because a phone was broken yesterday--thankfully not mine this time).

What areas in your house need a little decade + of purging?