Our kitchen has a lot of pleasing features, but right up near the top are the two appliance garages. One of them holds our toaster, air fryer, and seldom-used Ninja Creami. The other has been serving as a junk repository for the past three years.

Until now.

I’d originally designated “clean the appliance garage” as a chore Carla could take on to make extra money. However, Carla lacks both the time and the motivation to tackle such a task, and it continued to irritate me on a daily basis. So I tackled it.

I started by getting rid of: random boxes no longer holding their original contents, old school papers, old receipts, expired coupons, broken crayons, and an empty tape roll.

Then I relocated: an old laptop, several cords with no discernible purpose, recipes, sparkly ribbon, the handle to the ice roller I use for my feet, and a mini humidifier I no longer use.

It took an hour, maybe two.

And now look at the garage!!!

It still holds an assortment of useful things: rubber bands, permanent markers, a variety of tapes, a box cutter, notepads, tape measures, the remaining pair of scissors from what I swear was originally a three pack, coupons, a giant bottle of Purell with which my husband and I refill our smaller car bottles of Purell, spiral cat toys, our Bug Guy.

It also still retains some echoes of its previous contents, storing what I might call “valuable junk”: business cards I will possibly only review the next time I tidy this cupboard, a box FULL of pencils, a baggie full of the things that one sometimes finds and cannot identify, a timer I use maybe three times a year, and some wooden dividers that belong to our flatware drawer but have no place in the current configuration of said drawer.

The purpose of this particular appliance garage, beyond providing room and board to the aforementioned household detritus, is to serve as a home for my child’s laptop, iPad, and Switch. Aside from Very Specific Exceptions, I do not allow her to use those devices in her room, and I expect them to live in the garage when they are not expressly in use.

Right now, they sit in a little heap. This works just fine, but I kind of want them to have their own storage space. Partly because I like things to Look Organized, and partly because I have a vague unfounded worry that it isn’t good for their longevity, to sit on top of one another all the time.

If you search for “device storage,” you will find things like this. And this is FINE. But I want something that orients the devices horizontally rather than vertically. Why? Nobody knows. I just do.

Such a thing is surprisingly difficult to find. It dawned on me that I don’t need something specific for devices; we already have a way to plug each device in, and there are only three of them, so I can’t imagine the cords getting terribly tangled. I realized that what I was envisioning was really one of those filing stands that people put on their desks to sort ingoing and outgoing mail.

Less difficult to find, but surprisingly expensive.

This one is okay, but it seems overly expensive for what it is. I also sort of worry that it might tip forward with the weight of the laptop?

This one is cheap, but it’s also quite boring, and its sturdiness is questionable. I suppose a device shelf that lives inside a cupboard doesn’t have to be nice looking.

In terms of utilitarian sturdiness, this one gets high marks, but it is definitely too expensive for what it is.

I like this one, and I don’t think it would tip over at all. But it’s a little bulky for something that will live inside a cupboard.

Suffice it to say, I have not purchased any sort of device holder. YET.

Sometimes I charge Lenny’s robot ball (which is technically part of this toy) in the garage, which gives him extra justification for checking things out.

Some questions for you:

• Do you have a storage garage in your house? If so, what does it store?
• Where do you/your family members keep devices when they aren’t in use?
• How long until this tidy space devolves into squalor once more?