In the summer of 2020, I spent some time organizing the garage. This included facing the yogurt containers full of miscellaneous screws, nails, paperclips and the random cafe curtain ring. It was a tiresome task that used up my allotment of decision-making power for the day. Nevertheless, it felt good to do it. Tidying up always gives me a sense of accomplishment. And it’s particularly satisfying when I can benefit from my effort down the road, as I recently did.

I was, once again, organizing the garage and needed some really short screws that could be used to attach container lids to the bottom of a shelf. At first, it was looking like a trip to the hardware store was in order. But then I remembered that not only did I save some random screws, I organized them in such a way that they could be useful.

In one case, I used scraps of foil insulation to further divide the drawers in the hardware organizer that I was using. Other materials like a piece of thin cardboard would also work. Take a strip that is the width of and a bit longer than the drawer. Make a crease for however many dividers you want, being careful that the resulting divider doesn’t exceed the height of the drawer. Pinch. Staple. Insert.

Here’s a picture where you can see how two different types of nails are separated within the same drawer:

In another case, where I had a handful of onesies and twosies, I punched the screws through a scrap of foil insulation. This keeps them together nicely.

Then you can just put these little sheet of screws in a drawer:

As for why I wanted to screw container lids to the bottom of a shelf: more storage.

Ironically, as I was tidying up this year, I found three – count ’em! three! – yogurt containers full of random hardware.

Ugh!