How to Organize Your Toiletries and Medicines

Before to we moved to the master, a lot of our stuff was kept in the closet in the library. Bags (both plastic and duffel), spare sheets and towels, medicines, extra shampoo and deodorant. It was all there. We knew it wouldn't stay there when the master got done but we weren't sure where to put it in the mean time so it ended up there. The thing is, we don't have a linen closet and we have very little bathroom storage in this house.

My parents have a walk in closet, similar in size to ours, that holds all these kinds of things and I always assumed that our stuff would end up in the master closet too. Well, we have less shelves than them and we filled it up pretty quick with all of our "real" closet things (like clothes). However, when we lived in the little room, we had a big black shelf that held a lot of our clothes to make up for our small closet. Now with the closet, we don't need the shelf. We decided to make this our "linen closet" with toiletries and such on it.

We just finished organizing the top of it last night. The bottom will be extra sheets but we have to fix one of shelves first. Of course, things will have to change when Teeny gets older because there is some medicine within toddler reach but for now, this is the solution. I still wonder if we should group things in baskets or bins instead of just on the shelf but it's still a work in progress too.

So to start, (sorry that was such a long back story), you need to find the closet/area you want to hold all these things. Then, gather everything you want to put there. Next, group them all in categories that make sense to you. Our categories are towels and wash clothes, common extras (shampoo, body wash, vitamins, deodorant), teeth (extra paste, brush heads, floss), pain relief, general medicine (tums, sleep help, band aids, etc), allergies, sick, bath/pamper, and outdoor (sunscreen, bug spray, aloe vera).

They aren't really in order by anything but we tested it and the categories make the most sense to us. Of course, we might decide that shampoo and body wash really should be with bubble bath but we'll deal with that later.

Then you either put them on the shelf as is or in bins (preferably labeled). And you're done! Now you just gotta keep it neat. You could also label the shelves if you didn't want bins but still wanted everything easy to find.

Here is what our shelf looks like.

I would also recommend putting travel size things all in the same area, instead of in their proper category to make it easier to find them when you are packing. We just don't happen to have any.

So then below what you can see in the picture will be our extra sheets. Looks nice, doesn't it? Well, actually it only looks nice if you know the categories. Otherwise it just looks like stuff everywhere. I better convince David we need bins. I actually have a pattern as to how to make your own baskets that I might make for this, with labels of course. I will also mention that I believe dollar stores would sell bins that would make for good organizers so you don't have to spend a lot of money on this project.