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ORGANIZED: BATHROOM SHELVES

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High Straightenence by Tracy Benjamin

A weekly column celebrating the neat freak in all of us.

Organizing Goal of 2012 COMPLETED:

get rid of unnecessary items in the bathroom & organize!

You saw me organize the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, now it’s time to organize my bathroom shelves.

Here’s the deal. We have a master bathroom but there’s nothing master about it. It’s actually pretty small! We have a pedestal sink (means no storage), a medicine cabinet and this little section of shelving next to the door. It’s kinda cramped! We totally want to re-do our bathroom some day but for now we have to live with it! I thought about covering the shelves with a curtain, but it’s too narrow. So basically it’s always EXPOSED! This is the main reason why I keep guests out of my bathroom ;)

This is the BEFORE. There was absolutely no styling involved in this mess.

Nope. It’s au naturale!

I once thought I was being all neat with these gray bins for organizing.

After a few years of use & abuse, they’re full of CRAP.

I recently went on two trips and suddenly there are 4 travel bags littering my shelves…

Miss Lazybones didn’t feel like unpacking!

My makeup section? I don’t want to talk about it. Oooh! That’s where those Angry Birds Band aids are!

I spent about 3 1/2 hours working on this project over the weekend. Let me walk you through it.

My main goal was to GET RID OF STUFF I DON’T WANT/NEED/USE.

STEP 1: CLEAR OFF SHELVES (and clean them!)

STEP 2: SORTING (I secretly love this part until I get overwhelmed).

I started with the hardest part first. I knew that if I was gonna commit, I was gonna CAH-MIT.

I couldn’t leave this on my bathroom floor all night, now could I?

I started with my makeup drawer and found a bunch of Halloween makeup from over 3 years ago. BUH-BYE.

There were also a few eye shadows that were waaaaay past their prime and some things I would never wear.

Oh! There’s nail polish in there. Nail polish belongs in my nail polish container!

I paired down my makeup drawer to this!

The great JEWELRY sort! This one took me awhile.

In the end, I was able to figure out what it is I need/don’t need. Why should I organize things I’m never going to wear?

PURGE! I could stare at this all day.

And here’s what all three of those drawers look like on the inside.

STEP 3: PUT EVERYTHING BACK & START ON ANOTHER SHELF!

I moved onto the makeup shelf/section. The hub of clutter!

I had thrown a lot of stuff in this area because I’ve been in too much of a hurry to bother.

That’s really why we get so disorganized in the first place, isn’t it?

If you don’t put stuff back where it belongs, it piles up and then things gets OUT OF CONTROL.

After I got the makeup section organized, I went up another shelf and hit up one of those gray bins.

It was full of cold meds, q-tips, shampoo & pills! It was totally overflowing!

Time to SORT/PURGE/ORGANIZE.

Now it looks like this inside. I can totally manage that. The husband knows where to find things now…

I also put the travel bags away in the linen closet upstairs (another organizing project to do!)

Why was I wasting soooo much room? Pure laziness.

When I was almost done, I had a bunch of items leftover with NO PLACE TO GO. I re-purposed another one of my Tupperware bins and stacked it on top. I HAVE SIX DRAWERS NOW!

I made a whole drawer for hairbrushes! You have no idea how much this excites me.

While I was at it, I decided to bust out my label maker. Why yes! My label maker IS labeled!

And here’s what that stack looks like now! All I had to do was move the shelf up a little and TADA!

A thing of beauty…

Drawers for: MAKEUP, JEWELRY, SPA STUFF, TRAVEL STUFF, REFILLS & HAIRBRUSHES

Let’s look at the overview now:

Let me just stare at it for a moment…

So that makeup section…

It’s all neat & organized now. I got rid of a few things and put stuff away. I cleaned out my brushes while I was at it.

I’m totally going to keep like this. NO EXCUSES.

The top shelf used to house a bin full of cleaning supplies. I moved them to our laundry room for safekeeping.

THAT SHELF IS PRIME REAL ESTATE.

I also re-purposed three bins I had in other parts of my house.

The floral bin holds my hair dryer & flat iron (they used to be shoved somewhere in between the Tupperware drawers).

The blue bin holds soap refills & the white bin holds dental stuff. They’re labeled!

The bottom shelf holds our towels & our scale.

Even if the master bathroom doesn’t look the way we want it to, it’s looking fresh with a new organizing system!

Soo worth the effort.

 

 

Tracy Benjamin

Tracy Benjamin is obsessed with good food, great photography, and pretty things.

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