Five Steps to Organizing and Simplifying your Bathroom Closet

This post was first published March 30, 2012.

So here we are at the end of Project Simplify. This is the first year I’ve done it and boy, was it fun! (I’m being serious, in case you’re wondering.) There’s nothing like a deadline and some imagined online pressure to purge stuff and post photos of it afterwards. 

This week I went after the bathroom closet.

It had kind-of exploded.

There were five specific steps I took to clean out the closet, which is super deep and houses all of our medicines, “pampering” items, towels, washcloths and toiletries. (There is a baby proof lock on the door of course!) Here are the steps, hopefully they can help you with your own bathroom purge! 

1. Pull out towels, sort and pare down. The color scheme of our bathroom has changed a bit in the eight years since we’ve been married so I no longer needed the light-green towels of the past. They and some old baby towels (sniff!) were still in decent shape, so I set them in a pile to donate to the local Humane Society (they use them for cleaning and bedding the animals). 

2. Pull out medicines, purge and reorganize. I can’t tell you how many expired medicines were hiding in our closet (and I mean really expired). It’s not that we had used any of them, we just hadn’t taken the time to throw them away. We now have a bag of old pills ready to be disposed of by the local pharmacist. I organized the rest by category (all you Type-A personalities understand that madness.)

3. Pull out toiletries, donate some and sort. I got a lot of these things for free using coupons. We’re moving toward more natural products but in the mean time, I’m using up my stash. I had lots of mouthwash, sample shampoos and bars of soap, all things our local Christian shelter loves, so into a donation bag it went! 

I grabbed some baskets from the living room that weren’t in use and reorganized the remainder of my toiletries into them. I could just squeal with delight at how nice it looks now!

4. Go through and dump old and half-used beauty products you no longer like. I had a ton of stuff sitting around from my college days, like old foot scrubs and hair gels, that will never again be used. I reminisced for a few moments, the good memories of pampering sessions with my beloved roommates, and then felt so good finally letting go. After all, it’s not people, it’s just stuff.

5. Clean the shelves and walls of the closet and set up your closet for streamlined use! Before I put everything back in, I wiped down the closet with a soapy rag. It’s amazing how sticky and dusty it gets, even when you think every surface is covered with stuff! Then I put what remained back in the closet, making sure everything was moved to the front (I’m discovering that I love having empty space!). 

Similar items were grouped and stored together and things we don’t use often were placed toward the back of the top shelf, where my husband can reach :)

Once again, before…and after!

Note to self: Must fix peeling shelf liner. Again. Or just replace it. Someday.

What have you simplified lately?
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