Organizing a Junk Cabinet

I'm so excited that I have enough cabinets in my kitchen to have a "junk" cabinet.  In my old kitchen I only had enough cabinets to cover kitchen essentials plus one skinny... I'm talking 3.5 inches wide made to hold only about 3 wooden spoons tiny drawer that we used as a junk drawer.  Not only do I have a junk cabinet in this kitchen but I also have a junk drawer... because who doesn't need more space for their junk?

My junk includes, cameras and their various cords, candles, batteries, receipts, coupons and other random items.  So this is great, right?  A whole cabinet for all of these odds and ends that should probably be in my office (but I am way too lazy to walk to the office everytime I want to take a picture or get a coupon... I have kids and I'm cheap, I take lots of pictures and always am digging around for a coupon!) So, it is most excellent that I can stash them in my kitchen where they are oh so handy! 

It is great... until your cabinet ends up looking like this....

Yikes... now it looks like junk. and who can find anything in there?  Me... but not my sweet hubs.  He rifles through it looking for something and leaves it looking even worse. 

This used to be a common occurence with our medicine cabinet until I came up with this complicated organizational system of baskets with labels... (I'm being sarcastic here in case you couldn't tell)  You can see what I did here. 

It has worked extremely well in our medicine cabinet so I thought why not try it in our junk cabinet too? 

I went to the dollar store because I'm a big spender and looked at their fine array of storage type baskets.  They really have a large selection but most of the sizes all seem to be wider at the top, skinny at the bottom.  I didn't want that shape because it doesn't hold very much and wastes precious inches in my junk cabinet between the baskets.

I ended up getting these baskets because they don't waste as much space when they are next to each other,  they are pretty deep and they leave about 2 inches behind them to stash a few things.  I couldn't find any baskets that were the same depth as my cabinets but that's what you get for a dollar. . 

I used leftover ribbon and tags that I had from my medicine cabinet to fancy these up a bit.

After all the junk was sorted into the appropriately labeled baskets I decided to get rid of the cookbooks because they took up too much space and they make these things called book shelves.  In my organizing frenzy I even cleaned the bulletin board. 

Here it is with the new "complicated organization system". 

Now, if we can just keep it this way.  The project ended up costing me $9 bucks.  Definitely a small price to pay for some much needed organization.