Real World Organizing: Drawer Dividers

Drawers collect junk. Small junk gets messy. Before you know it, you can’t find a thing. Dresser drawers seem to be the worst for this (except maybe for those kitchen drawers that catch all the bits and pieces of your life), for many of us. It’s a constant struggle against chaos.

I’ve used cut-down milk cartons to make drawer dividers, and Kleenex boxes with the top cut out. Any kind of square or rectangular box that can be made to fit snugly into your drawer — that’s a big help in getting organized. No one’s going to see them, but you can always line with fabric or sticky-backed vinyl shelf paper or such, if you want to pretty it up.

Storables has a nice simple 32-compartment diamond drawer organizer on clearance sale right now for $7.95, plus shipping. It measures 18.5″ L x 14.25″ W x 2.75″ H and can be trimmed down to fit smaller drawers.

But if you’re feeling particularly crafty, you can make your own “diamond” drawer divider.
(The name refers to the shape of each cubby, but there’s no reason you can’t use it to keep your pieces of shiny-shiny away from the rest of your personal gear.)

Have you seen the cardboard inserts for wine boxes or boxes that are used for shipping glassware? That’s the kind of thing we need to create here… just like the store-bought drawer dividers, only made of sturdy cardboard.

Cut strips of cardboard that are just a little bit less than the height of the sides of your drawer, and as long as they’d need to be to fit your particular size of drawer. For the longest pieces, measure your drawer on the diagonal, inside, and cut two pieces of that length. (You can figure out how long the other pieces need to be quite easily as you go along, once you’ve got these first two cut and assembled.) Look back at the picture of the Storables unit, above, to see what pieces you’ll need.

At the mid-point of one of your longest cardboard strips, make a cut that goes from one edge straight in to the centre. If your cardboard divider will be 2 inches high, for example, this cut will be about one inch long — maybe just a bit more. Do that on both of them, then fit the two cuts together. Beginning to see how this works? Repeat with more strips of cardboard, spacing out the cuts to match the size of drawer compartment you’ll need and fitting one piece of cardboard into another.

Voila! A diamond-shaped drawer organizer!

And if plain brown cardboard isn’t doing it for your decor, you can always cover the strips with sticky-backed vinyl shelf paper (Mac Tac or that sort of thing) before you make the cuts and fit them together.

Tagged as: craft, drawer, organizing