For our third installment of Fabulous 15 Minute Organizing Fixes, we’ll tackle a small but worthy area of the home – the bathroom drawer. If you don’t have any drawers in your bathroom, apply this same process to another area that could use attention, such as the medicine cabinet, vanity top, or a cabinet. You can either choose a small project that can be quickly completed, or a larger one that you can devote at least 15 minutes to right now.
If you happen to have large, spacious drawers in your bathroom, I am so envious you are so lucky! But really, regardless of space, this can be a tricky area to maintain. Small drawers easily get overwhelmed by stuff, and large drawers can end up holding more than they should. Either way, a few minutes giving it a quick fix will give you that “ooooh, ahhhh” feeling every time you open the drawer. Who doesn’t love that?
So, grab your organizing toolkit, and let’s get started. Here… I will motivate you by showing you the “before” picture of my drawer. It could be worse, but still…it just wan’t working for me!
Pull everything out of the drawer and try to sort as you go. Make quick decisions if something can be tossed, recycled or donated, and sort accordingly. This can be rather messy, and once the drawer is empty you might find such delights as globs of dripped toothpaste or leaky ointment tubes (speaking from experience here). But you’ve got your organizing toolkit on hand so you can clean up quickly without having to fetch more supplies.
Now that your drawer is empty and clean, take a look at the piles of sorted items. Do they still belong in this drawer or do they belong somewhere else? For example, a stray bottle of nail polish might belong in your stash of manicure supplies instead of this drawer. Decide what’s staying, and stick anything else into a temporary bin or basket. You can put these items in their rightful places once your 15-minute project is done so you don’t get distracted.
Looking at the drawer and the contents that are staying, decide on any containers to help keep things organized. Sometimes cups or mugs work well if the drawer is deeper. Small drawers may benefit from small bowls or boxes. If you want to add containers, take measurements so you know the dimensions of the drawer and what size any containers need to be. If you have already set up a container station, now is a great time to visit it! It’s likely that you already have containers in your home to help keep this drawer organized.
In my own bathroom, I have one drawer which is unusually wide and very shallow. For a while, I re-purposed plastic take-out containers (as you can see in that first photo) because they happened to be the only thing I found that was shallow enough to fit. But at back-to-school time, I snagged a few desk organizers from the dollar store — Target also had some in the dollar spot — that were just the right size.
Two of them fit perfectly side-by-side and hold everything I need in this drawer. I love when that happens! Since I open this drawer 2-3 times each day, I get to “ooooh, ahhhh” often! Now that is a whole lot of happiness for my $2 and 15-minute investment!
Is it just me, or do you have challenges with odd bathroom drawer sizes (or lack of drawers altogether)? Happy Organizing!
