Tips for Organizing Your Medicine Cabinet

The medicine cabinets in your bathroom, or bathrooms, are tempting places to store just about any small item: toothpaste, cosmetics, contact lens cases, and the actual items they were originally designed to store – medicines.  Unfortunately, medicine cabinets are usually relatively small, and before you know it the space can become overloaded, disorganized, and even unclean.

To maintain an organized medicine cabinet, it’s important to decide what should be stored inside.  If you want to limit its use to medications, make sure that storage is elsewhere in your bathroom for items such as toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, hair bands, shaving cream, and cosmetics.  Soap dishes or dispensers (which are often neater) are a must, and decorative shelving near the vanity is another good idea.  Vanity drawers can be used to store larger items such as bandages, hairbrushes, and extra toothpaste, and closet space beneath your vanity or elsewhere in the room can store towels, washcloths, extra toilet paper rolls, spare bottles of shampoo, and other items.

Once you’ve made sure to provide enough storage for extraneous items, pull everything out of your medicine cabinet.  Throw away any empty containers or items you no longer use.  If you have unused or expired medications, check the FDA’s recommendations for how to dispose of them properly.  Their guidelines include specific directives, including following disposal instructions on the drug label and taking advantage of community drug take-back programs.  The FDA also provides directions for how to safely dispose of medications in the trash when there is no other option.  It is important to dispose of drugs properly to guard home safety and to protect the environment.

After you’ve disposed of unused items and filtered out whatever can be stored elsewhere, clean your medicine cabinet thoroughly.  Wipe the back and shelves with a damp cloth, using glass cleaner if necessary.  Once the inside is clean, wipe off the bottles and containers that you’ll be replacing in the cabinet; you’ll be surprised at how much dust and gunk will cling to these items over time. 

Martha Stewart has a nifty suggestion for preparing your medicine cabinet to be restocked in an organized manner.  She recommends having two pieces of galvanized metal cut to the size of the back of your cabinet and the inside door, and then adhering the pieces to the cabinet using caulk.  You can then attach magnetized hooks to the metal, and even a notepad holder, which will be useful for holding makeup brushes and hair combs.  

A spice canister or small ceramic bowl can serve well as a container for hair bands and barrettes (if you’ll be storing those in your medicine cabinet).  Stewart recommends grouping like items together when you restock the cabinet.  Store medicines on one shelf, for example, and hair accessories and cosmetics on another.  Shelf size will of course determine the location of certain items, such as bottles that require a certain amount of height between shelves. 

One of the real challenges of organizing your medicine cabinet is how to maintain the organization once you’ve achieved it.  Unless you live alone or have a private bathroom in your home, it’s likely that other family members use the cabinet.  You can ask them to replace things neatly and to discard expired and unused items, of course, but the reality is they might not always follow up on these requests. 

All you can do is re-check the medicine cabinet on a regular basis and prepare to do small-scale re-cleanings.  Remove unused or expired items periodically, and do a quick wipe and cleanup of what’s left.  Replace items in the organized manner you love, and enjoy it while it lasts.  Organization is, after all, a continuous process of staying on top of things that you know can get disorganized over time.  The good news is that if you commit to the effort on a regular basis, organizing your medicine cabinet will never be as hard as it was the first time.