Organizing And Maintaining a Healthy Medicine Cabinet

Your medicine cabinet is a miniature closet that holds your most personal products and tools, and yet it’s often the most neglected spot in your bathroom. If you want to take yours from vertical junk drawer to organized awesomeness, follow these easy steps… and give nosey visitors cabinet envy!

1. Start With a Good Purging

As with any closet organizing effort, you’ll want to start with a blank slate. Empty everything out and give the interior a good, disinfecting scrub. Get rid of anything that you don’t use. Toss lotions and lipsticks of suspicious origin, or nailbrushes that have been with you since the Bush administration. Get ready to put back only what you use most often, and find another space for things that get pulled out less frequently, in baskets under your sink or in a nearby closet.

2. Taking the Medicine out of Your Medicine Cabinet

Despite its name, this is not the smartest place to store your prescriptions or over the counter medicines. Drugs are perishable and their efficacy can be affected by the humidity and changing temperatures in your bathroom. You should keep a stock of remedies on hand to be prepared for minor illnesses, colds, headaches, etc., however, store these items in airtight containers elsewhere in your house, like your linen closet or refrigerator, and always out of reach of children and pets. (Read the product label for storage guidelines.)

A note about storing medicine: It’s important to keep these perishable items current, so mark your calendar and check expiration dates every six months. When discarding old medications, the safest way to dispose of them is to wait for a FDA Drug Take Back Day … better safe than sorry! For complete information on how to dispose of drugs, visit the FDA website.

3. Determine What To Move Back In

This prime real estate known as your medicine cabinet should be reserved for the most important or favorite daily use items. It may be contact lens solution or facial moisturizers, mouthwash or frizz-control cream. Whatever you reach for most often when standing over your bathroom sink, is what should live in your medicine cabinet.

4. Fit is Fabulous!

Adjust the shelves to accommodate taller items like shaving cream and toothbrushes. Add small risers to make the most of the available vertical space and use clear organizers to collect small items like cotton swabs and nail files, to keep the shelves uncluttered. Glass surgical jars are great for keeping items dry and sanitary and affixing a small magnet inside the cabinet door means you’ll never have to search for tweezers, scissors or bobby pins again!

5. Make it Manageable

It’s likely that you purchase your most frequently used items like hair products or makeup remover in large quantities, which can make them difficult to store on shallow medicine cabinet shelves. Use smaller bottles that fit your cabinet’s shelves and dispense a couple of weeks’ worth of product into them at a time, then stash the larger supplies in your closet, leaving the cabinet and countertops clutter-free.

When was the last time you cleaned out your medicine cabinet? What do you reach for every day? Share with us your top three can’t-live-without-them products from your medicine cabinet in the comments below.

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