Real World Organizing: Drawer Dividers for Small Stuff

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. Unless you divide and conquer the clutter, it’s a constant struggle to corral those socks and dainties.

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.

But we can do even better, for the small items!

Honey-Can-Do has a nice white plastic diamond drawer organizer you can pick up at Amazon, if you can’t find it locally. It’s a set of interlocking pieces to give you 32 little compartments inside your dresser drawer. Trim it down to fit smaller drawers, if you want. For larger drawers, combine with other organizers for max flexibility, or double up on the diamond partitions.

(The name “diamond” just refers to the shape of each cubby or compartment, but if you want to stash bling in there along with your socks and undies, go for it.)

And if you’re feeling crafty, you can make your own DIY version of this smart drawer divider kit.

Have you seen the cardboard inserts for wine boxes, Christmas ornament storage boxes, or those special packing boxes with partitions that are used for moving your glassware?  Something like this.

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.)

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.) Make that cut on both of your longest pieces, then slide the two cuts together to interlock the pieces. 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! Your own DIY 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 liner or decorative contact paper before you make the cuts and fit the pieces together. Truly, a custom drawer-organizing solution – and you can tweak the size and shape to perfectly fit any drawer in your home that needs a little help in controlling the clutter.